e on edge iv v3 - un cc:learn · edge of an abyss, looking into a very black hole, or whether it is...

Environment Edge

on the

St Edmund’s CollegeUniversity of Cambridge

New HallUniversity of Cambridge

Environment on the Edge is a series of lectures given by leading

international figures that examine our current relationship with the

natural world and discuss what tomorrow might bring.

The 2007/08 series lecturers were:

Professor Sharon Turner, Chair of Environmental Law, Queen’s

University, Belfast

Barbara Young, Chief Executive, UK Environment Agency

Lord Adair Turner, former Director-General, CBI; Chair, UK Climate

Change Committee

Professor Sian Griffiths, Professor of Public Health, The Chinese

University of Hong Kong

Professor Nick Owens, Director, British Antarctic Survey

Professor Robert T. Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser, UK

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The lecture series, which continues in 2008/09, is a joint

collaboration between the United Nations Environment

Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-

WCMC), New Hall and St Edmund’s College, University of

Cambridge, and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

The lecture series and the production of this publication were

made possible by the generosity of BP.

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British Antarctic SurveyNATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL

ISBN: 978-92-807-2993-1

2007/08

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EnvironmentEdge

on the

2007/08

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Environmenton the Edge

UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre 219 Huntingdon RoadCambridge CB3 0DL, UKTel: +44 (0) 1223 277314Fax: +44 (0) 1223 277136Email: [email protected]: www.unep-wcmc.org

THE UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME

WORLD CONSERVATION MONITORING CENTRE (UNEP-WCMC) is the biodiversity assessment and policyimplementation arm of the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP), the world’sforemost intergovernmental environmentalorganization. The Centre has been in operationfor over 25 years, combining scientific researchwith practical policy advice.

St Edmund’s College University of CambridgeCambridge CB3 0BN, UKTel: +44 (0) 1223 336250 Fax: +44 (0) 1223 762822Website: www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk

ST EDMUND’S COLLEGE is a graduate college in theUniversity of Cambridge. Over two thirds of itsstudents are pursuing graduate courses with theremainder being undergraduates over the age of21. The College is active in supporting initiativesto foster environmental sustainability.

New HallUniversity of CambridgeHuntingdon Road Cambridge CB3 0DF, UKTel: +44 (0) 1223 762100Fax: +44 (0) 1223 763110 Email: [email protected] Website: www.newhall.cam.ac.uk

NEW HALL is a women’s college of the University of Cambridge, committed to the higheststandards of education for women of allbackgrounds, enabling students to realize theirfull potential at Cambridge and in their futurelives and careers. The College has a particular interest in promoting research and debate on environmental issues and sustainabledevelopment.

British Antarctic SurveyHigh Cross, Madingley RoadCambridge CB3 0ET, UKTel: +44 (0) 1223 221400Fax: +44 (0) 1223 362616Website: www.antarctica.ac.uk

THE BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY is a research centreof the Natural Environment Research Council. Forover 60 years it has been the mainstay of Britain’sscientific research on and around the Antarcticcontinent, and it is recognized as a world authorityon the role of Antarctica in the Earth system.

© UNEP-WCMC/New Hall/St Edmund’s College/British Antarctic Survey 2008

A Banson productionPrinted on FSC paper by The Lavenham Press, UK

Photos: page 6 UNEP/Topham; page 21 Geny de O’Cobra/UNEP/Topham; page 33 Zack Pedrick; page 50 ShihuaZhao/UNEP/Topham; page 59 Chemical Oceanography Unit/University of Liège; page 70 UNEP/Topham.

The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United Nations EnvironmentProgramme, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centreor the supporting and contributing organizations. Thedesignations employed and the presentations do not implythe expressions of any opinion whatsoever on the part ofthese organizations concerning the legal status of anycountry, territory, city or area or its authority, or concerningthe delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

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New HallUniversity ofCambridge

Environment Edge

on the

2007/08

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The lecture series, which continues in 2008/09, is a joint collaboration

between the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation

Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), New Hall and St Edmund’s College,

University of Cambridge, and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).




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CONTENTS

Northern Ireland: an environment on the edge 6

Professor Sharon Turner

Travelling first class on the Titanic 21

Barbara Young

The economics of climate change 33

Lord Adair Turner

Creating a healthy environment in China 50

Professor Sian Griffiths

Ocean acidification: the other CO2 problem 59

Professor Nick Owens

International environmental governance 70

Professor Robert T. Watson


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6

Environmenton the Edge Northern Ireland: an environment on the edge

Professor Sharon Turner October 2007

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Speaking to you this evening it is not entirely clear whether Northern Ireland’s environment is at the

edge of an abyss, looking into a very black hole, or whether it is standing at the beginning of a bright

new future as an era of more stable devolution begins. We are a society in a state of transition, with

the new government just recently installed and yet to give us an indication of the likely direction of

travel for regional environmental policy. But rather than focus on the individual details of that policy,

I shall simply tell you the story of where Northern Ireland and its environment have come from and

where I think they are heading.

It goes without saying that for many years the environment in Northern Ireland was essentially a

non-issue, with human rights, equality, victimhood and security dominating politics and policy.

However, as the peace process has consolidated and the economy has begun to stabilize, the envi-

ronment has come dramatically and somewhat unexpectedly to the fore. There is now a sense that,

whereas once we were seemingly determined to destroy our environment, both the government and

people of Northern Ireland are beginning to recognize this very unmet challenge.

Before we get much further it is worth pointing out that the pressure for reform has come in waves

– and not always from within Northern Ireland. But it has undoubtedly culminated in a number of very

important changes, most recently the launch of a thorough-going Review of Northern Ireland’s arrange-

ments for environmental governance, commissioned by the Secretary of State, Peter Hain, in which I

have taken part as a panel member.

Although the Review was commissioned by the direct rule government, it was nevertheless viewed

by many as a policy signal that those in power were now ready to embrace an ambitious programme of

reform in the sphere of the environment. Towards the end of the Review period, devolution was restored

and so we presented our final report, Foundations for the Future, in June 2007 to Arlene Foster, the

Democratic Unionist Party’s Minister for the Environment in a devolved administration. Its response to

the Review will undoubtedly be a litmus test of where Northern Ireland and its environment are likely

to go over the next few years.

Northern Ireland and its environment are at a crucial juncture. The region’s economy has been

crippled through years of conflict and there is enormous pressure for recovery and regeneration. The


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Troubles have left a legacy of severe social deprivation and a wide range of unmet policy needs. Although

the environment is undoubtedly a key economic, social and cultural asset, its importance has yet to be

grasped by the new government and there is little shared civic sense of it being a public-interest issue.

We have the heaviest ecological footprint in the United Kingdom, and reorienting our society to take

account of the environmental challenges of the present – not to mention the future – is going to be an

enormous task for its people, its government and its NGO community.

To a considerable extent the scale of official neglect of Northern Ireland’s environment can be

viewed or understood through its failure to engage with the evolution of European Union law and

policy on the environment. Whereas the European Community started to take a lead role in driving

environmental policy in the 1970s, Northern Ireland started its steady decline into the Troubles. In

effect, while the rest of the United Kingdom and Europe were beginning to turn their attention to

addressing the environment, policy making in Northern Ireland was consumed by issues of security,

human rights and a collapsing economy.

Twenty years later, by the early 1990s, the House of Commons Select Committee on the

Environment came to Northern Ireland and carried out the first independent analysis of the state of its

environment. One of the major findings to emerge was government’s endemic neglect of environmental

EU law. Although Northern Ireland was bound by EU environmental directives as part of the United

Kingdom, it had simply ignored the vast majority of them. At that time, of course, the EC was about to

amend the EC Treaty to give the Court of Justice the power to fine Member States for non-compliance

with Community law, and so Northern Ireland represented a significant financial liability for the UK.

Although government in Northern Ireland undertook to clear the EU backlog, a decade later it was

obvious that the pace of legislative change was insufficient to remain abreast of EU developments in this

field – much less to clear the backlog of unimplemented EU environmental directives.

By 2000 it became obvious that the European Commission had run out of patience and was no

longer prepared to allow Northern Ireland – or indeed the United Kingdom – to let the situation

continue. More importantly, full legislative powers had been devolved to the Assembly in the previous

year, but with devolution came the transfer of liability for the payment of fines incurred as a result of

failure to comply with European legislation. EU litigation for non-compliance, combined with the

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transfer of liability for payment of EU fines to the devolved administration, generated the first effective

stimulus for major modernization.

In the autumn of 2001 I was sitting in my office at Queen’s University when I received a phone call

from the new Head of Environmental Policy in the Northern Ireland Department of Environment

(DOE), asking me if I would like to help resolve (rather than continually highlight) the crisis that was by

then facing the department. There began a fascinating two years in which I took a secondment to the

Northern Ireland DOE, and assisted them in handling a vast range of litigation from the European

Commission and in driving the single largest legislative programme brought before the new Assembly by

any Northern Ireland department at that time. Practically every single area of environmental policy was

subject to EU litigation, with the threat of very large-scale EU fines looming – large enough to make a

major dent in Northern Ireland’s budget.

At the time that I joined the DOE I had been studying the Northern Ireland situation quite closely

for some years. As an informed observer I knew that the DOE was facing an environmental policy

crisis; however, I did not realize just how difficult the situation was until I actually started to open the

files. In effect, I began to observe at close quarters the culture of government forged during 30 years

of direct rule and 30 years of policy vacuum. First of all, we had a whole generation of civil servants

with virtually no track record of complex policy making, much less policy making on the environment.

We were also dealing with a civil service that had never been used to policy making in the context of

democratic accountability.

Legislation in Northern Ireland during the entire duration of the Troubles was made in Westminster

by English politicians who spent very little time in Northern Ireland and who were not directly

accountable to the citizens of the region. With the exception of controversial criminal justice or human

rights legislation, proposed provisions for Northern Ireland often went before the House of Commons

late at night with little meaningful debate. Given that civil servants in Northern Ireland had little

experience of dealing with close parliamentary scrutiny or the need to justify new legislation, you can

imagine the shock of having to bring forward proposals for 45 complex pieces of legislation, including

primary legislation with far-reaching economic consequences, to a locally accountable Assembly –

almost all of which had to be rushed through in response to EU litigation.


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Not surprisingly, the Members of the new Northern Ireland Assembly, having been kept out of

government for many years, were very keen indeed to use their new legislative powers and to become

actively involved in the process of law making through scrutiny committees and Assembly debate.

Unfortunately, 30 years of direct rule had created an atmosphere of distrust between the two sides.

Officials, on the one hand, were frustrated with local politicians who knew very little about policy

making or their portfolios, while local politicians distrusted civil servants because they felt they had kept

them at bay for decades. So when I found myself as a lawyer trying to explain to the local Members of

the Legislative Assembly that the new legislation would have to be rushed through the scrutiny process

to avoid the imposition of large-scale EU fines, it caused tremendous tension. But out of that tension

came constructive change, a process of learning and far-reaching modernization of the legal framework

governing the environment in Northern Ireland.

Official and political recognition of the neglected state of environmental policy making and the

consequent EU liabilities resulted in the DOE’s Environmental Policy Division receiving the single

largest financial allocation in the first programme for government for Northern Ireland – effectively

pushing the environment right up the political agenda. Having come from absolutely nowhere, it was

suddenly a major policy issue. This may have occurred for the wrong reasons, but at least politicians and

senior civil servants were now being forced to look hard at how they had got themselves into this mess

and what they were going to do to get out of it. The Assembly Environment Committee agreed to a

shortened period of scrutiny for major pieces of environmental legislation which signalled an acceptance

of the infraction crisis. However, the Assembly’s Committee of the Centre also made clear that the DOE

needed to radically alter its internal culture and ensure proactive management of Northern Ireland’s

obligation to implement EU directives on the environment to avoid a repetition of this compromise of

the democratic process.

The media also became fascinated with this tale of environmental neglect and responsibility, and

continued to report this story. There was also a significant cultural or psychological realignment within

the civil service in this context. Senior civil servants and local politicians were forced to accept that

Northern Ireland was no longer a ‘special case’ in the throes of a civil war, to be let off lightly by the

European Commission. The time for endless procrastination was over and action was expected. Over

some rather bracing meetings during this period with officials from the European Commission, the UK

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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Treasury, it was made abundantly

clear that Northern Ireland would be expected to comply with EU law as part of the United Kingdom.

The other major realization at that time was the cost and inefficiency of devolution. Northern Ireland

has almost fully devolved powers on the environment – essentially equivalent to those transferred in

Scotland. So even though our population is only (approximately) 1.5 million, we have the cost of a full

apparatus of environmental policy making and liabilities. In addition, as Scottish devolution became more

robust, it became clear that Defra would focus more heavily on England and Wales and thereby do less

of the thinking for Northern Ireland than it had in the past. If Northern Ireland’s economic, social and

environmental conditions were to be adequately represented in the development of EU policy on the

environment, its civil service and Assembly began to realize that Northern Ireland could not simply

duplicate or ‘piggy-back’ on policy development in Scotland, England and Wales. Northern Ireland needed

to develop the capacity to think independently and engage proactively in the complex and fast-moving

policy debates surrounding the development of the United Kingdom’s negotiating position in Europe.

Devolution was suspended in 2002 – to an audible sigh of relief across the Northern Ireland civil

service. Because of the suspension of the Assembly, the DOE was able to rush through the remaining

parts of the legislative framework necessary to avoid EU fines. But even though the DOE was ultimately

successful in averting the imposition of fines, that period left a (hopefully) lasting impression on

Northern Ireland’s political and policy communities.

During the period of suspension (2002 to 2007), everybody expected the environmental agenda to

go back into the political vacuum from which it had emerged, but in fact it remained high on the radar.

I think there were three major reasons for that. First of all, we were fortunate in having Peter Hain as

Secretary of State. Whereas previous secretaries of state had been willing to let policy just tick over, Peter

Hain was not only interested in the environment itself, he was also determined to bring a conclusion to

the constitutional deadlock and force through some major policy initiatives. The environmental NGO

community played an important role in keeping the debate alive (I will explain that in more detail in a

few moments), and the UK Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) also played a significant role

in maintaining the momentum of reform. For many years the SDC had remained a Britain-focused

organization, touring London, Scotland and Wales for its plenary sessions, commenting on government


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action in Great Britain while largely ignoring Northern Ireland. By this time, the SDC had become much

more focused on policy making on sustainable development issues in Northern Ireland, making regular

visits, asking difficult questions, and keeping pressure on local politicians and the civil service, and on

Peter Hain’s direct rule administration.

To give you a flavour of what Peter Hain managed to achieve during that period it is important to

remember that many local politicians had been effectively absolved from the consequences of suspended

devolution because direct rule governments had typically made no major policy changes – always

waiting for the outcome of constitutional negotiation and the restoration of power to locally

accountable politicians. Peter Hain broke from this ‘circling pattern’ by proposing a range of far-

reaching environmental and social policy changes. He suggested abolishing the 11+ exam for school

children, which caused enormous public outcry; he introduced the first and long-overdue Sustainable

Development Strategy; and introduced a policy to dramatically reduce rural development in the region.

Northern Ireland’s Planning Service gives planning permission for more single dwellings in the

countryside each year than is granted for the rest of the United Kingdom put together. Rampant rural

development is almost a part of Irish culture, both north and south of the border, so this new policy

statement caused outrage amongst the local populus. Hain also brought forward legislation introducing

water charges for the first time as well as dramatically increasing domestic rates to contribute to the cost

of upgrading Northern Ireland’s very out-of-date sewage treatment infrastructure.

For the first time, local people began to see policy decision making that was going to affect them at

a financial, educational and personal level. They started to view the endless constitutional negotiations

much more critically, which created local pressure for the restoration of devolution to halt Hain’s policy

march. In 2007 we had the first election in Northern Ireland in which the constitution was not the only

issue under discussion. Development control, water quality, water charging and environmental issues

became major electoral questions.

In terms of the NGOs’ role, 30 years of direct rule and the absence of devolved or democratic

politics had given rise to a vibrant NGO sector in the field of human rights – and equality in particular

– but a somewhat timid environmental sector. Rather than leading public campaigns on the

environment, Northern Ireland’s environmental NGOs had traditionally fostered almost private

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relationships with officials, with negotiations taking place behind closed doors. This was partly the

outcome of having no levers for exerting democratic pressure but also led to the silencing of this part of

the region’s voluntary community. But with the restoration of devolution in the late 1990s, key elements

of the United Kingdom’s national environmental NGO community significantly increased funding to

their offices in Northern Ireland, leading to an important rise in capacity. Nine of the region’s

environmental groups then formed a coalition in 2004 and launched a sophisticated campaign to

pressure for regulatory reform. While the period from 1999 to 2004 had witnessed a focus on

modernizing the legislative framework governing the environment, attention now turned to the fact that

none of it was being enforced, leading to a major loss of public confidence. In addition, because

Northern Ireland’s environmental regulator (the Environment and Heritage Service) was an executive

agency within the DOE, regulatory decision making occurred largely behind closed doors and thereby

lacked transparency. The coalition called for the creation of an independent environmental protection

agency (which Britain has had for many years). They asked Professor Richard Macrory to produce an

initial consultation paper setting out the pros and cons of such an independent agency, and then used

this document to lead the debate, highlighting the fact that the government itself was neither driving

the issues nor generating public interest. In 2005, the direct rule Minister for the Environment indicated

his willingness to agree to structural reform. However, the environmental NGO coalition was mean-

while becoming more ambitious in its demands. Mindful of the fact that any new agency would be

operating within a wider landscape of environmental governance distorted by decades of direct rule,

they asked for an independent review of the arrangements for environmental governance so that any

programme of change would take full account of the wider legacy of direct rule and the need for holistic

reform. The Review began in 2006 and was chaired by Tom Burke, with myself and Gordon Bell (from

industry) serving as panel members.

Our remit was incredibly wide. Going well beyond the question of regulation, we were asked to look

at all publicly funded aspects of the environment and adopt a transparent process. Following months of

public deliberation with a very wide cross-section of representatives from central and local government,

the private sector, the voluntary and community sectors, agriculture and industry, we launched our

report, Foundations for the Future, in June 2007. During its preparation – in fact, right up to the last

minute – we did not know if devolution would be restored in the short term or perhaps be put into long-

term cold storage, making it very difficult for us to design our recommendations. That said, our main


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finding was that the system of governance was not up to the job of meeting current environmental

challenges, or the more complex challenges of climate change to be faced for the future.

We acknowledged that government would be overstretched for many years as it turned its attention to

leading a post-conflict society forward and addressing a wide range of unmet policy needs. But our

underlying message was that the environment is central to both social and economic well-being and could

not be side-lined indefinitely. We emphasized that urgent reform was essential if Northern Ireland was to

have any chance of a sustainable future.

We have set out a suite of some 40 recommendations designed not to create a state-of-the-art system

of environmental governance, but to focus on the most pressing issues demanding reform. It would be

impossible here to go into the details, but I’ll give you a flavour of the sorts of changes we recommended.

First of all, we agreed with the environmental coalition and with Professor Macrory’s report that

government should create an independent environment agency in Northern Ireland. Almost to the point

of repetition, the people who communicated with us reflected a serious loss of public confidence in the

quality of environmental protection. The DOE or government as regulator was simply an unacceptable

way forward, not least because of a tremendous sense of lack of public confidence and transparency.

Power is hugely centralized in a direct rule context, with little in the way of democratically accountable

politics and many decisions being taken behind closed doors. Environmental regulation was a part of that

closed system because the DOE itself was a regulator. In addition, this centralized arrangement for

environmental regulation meant that Northern Ireland had no environmental champion capable of

leading informed public debate on the environment. The governments and people of Great Britain are

well used to having vocal environment agencies, but because the Environment and Heritage Service was

part of the DOE, which is ultimately comprised of civil servants, it could not be seen to openly disagree

with the Minister. In effect, not only was the environmental NGO sector labouring to throw off a legacy

of silence, the environmental regulator – as perhaps the most important official voice on the environment

– had also been silenced by the structure of governance.

However, we have also recommended an innovative structure for the independent agency. Rather

than suggest the creation of separate agencies for pollution control, nature conservation and built heritage

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– and partly due to Northern Ireland’s scale – we suggested a single holistic environmental regulator

spanning all these areas. There are many ongoing considerations of how it might work, but on balance

we were persuaded that there are considerable advantages to a holistic approach.

We also emphasized the need to restore regard for the rule of planning and environmental law,

which had been significantly undermined during the years of direct rule, while acknowledging the

particular challenges faced by the regulator in Northern Ireland. The environment agency, if established,

will face the prospect of regulating an international border – the only regulator in the United Kingdom

to have to do so – where the illegal smuggling of waste has intensified the problem of controlling serious

environmental crime. In particular, the regulator faced the problem of highly armed ex-paramilitaries

moving from traditional violence into waste crime, causing many of the most serious incidences of

environmental infringement. Regulating such entities poses huge challenges regarding both resources

and personnel.

We strongly recommended that the new agency embrace a proactive role in leading and informing

public debate and reform. We had given some attention to the barriers to environmental policy making

generated by the particular form of government in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement had

created a form of power sharing between the two major parties – the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)

and Sinn Féin – rather than a majority government, with almost all legislative powers on the

environment transferred to the Assembly. But in order to create the space for power sharing, 11 separate

government departments had to be created, making our small population enormously overgoverned,

but also fragmenting responsibility for environmental policy making across nine of the 11 central

government departments.

The point we made to government was that while the Review panel understood the need for such

a complex central government structure in a power-sharing context, it was almost impossible to move

policy making forward without a properly integrated policy system. A framework is needed to lessen

some of the worst excesses of that fragmentation. It was clear that the arrangements for power sharing

would hamper decision making in any event, but the added effect of structural fragmentation would

make it very hard indeed for Northern Ireland to keep pace with modern environmental thinking

and reform.


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We also made extensive recommendations about the need to modernize the environmental policy

community itself. In particular, we pointed out that Northern Ireland had no strategic vision for the

environment. Nobody seemed to know what environmental policy actually was, or even if there was any,

and the political parties had little or no environmental policy knowledge. While most of the parties were

very enthusiastic, they clearly had no background in this complex area. Government in Northern

Ireland had been restored with almost no preparation for government. In Scotland they had spent two

years training their prospective politicians in the major policy areas and for the process of policy making.

In Northern Ireland the ongoing constitutional poker game had eclipsed all preparation for devolution.

We made strenuous recommendations for the independent training of the political parties and also that

the Minister for the Environment have a special advisor in this field.

Another major issue for us – and I suppose a defining feature for Northern Ireland – is the island itself.

The island context shapes definitively the way in which environmental governance will be played out in

future. We are the only part of the United Kingdom sharing an international border and we have our own

self-contained island environment. There are powerful legal, political, environmental and economic drivers

stimulating the need for proactive collaboration between the North and the South of Ireland. The

environment is one of the very few areas identified explicitly by the Good Friday Agreement as a focus for

collaboration for the two governments, and we actively encourage them to use the mechanism of the North

South Ministerial Council, the Cross Border Bodies and the British Irish Council to come together around

this key issue. In our opinion this would serve to develop negotiating alliances for European purposes but

also to coordinate policy and regulatory solutions for managing the island’s environment.

The importance of enhanced accountability was also a major question for the Review panel and

remains a significant issue generally. Needless to say, the democratic deficit of direct rule has always been

a problem and, thankfully, as the Review drew to a close devolution was restored, thereby resolving the

core underlying lack of accountability. We made two significant recommendations to the government in

this regard. First, we recommended that it establish a cross-Assembly environmental audit committee.

As in England, we have a suite of scrutiny committees that follow each government department, but what

was absent from the system was a cross-Assembly committee which could look at how the whole of

government was performing on the environment. We also discovered that it was almost impossible to

establish how much was being spent on the environment and whether it represented any kind of value

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for money. So our second point was that an annual audit should be published explaining a) how much

money was being spent on the Northern Ireland environment and b) what value for money and what

environmental value that generated.

We were also struck by the absence of transparency surrounding the entire environmental manage-

ment process. There is no state of the environment report in Northern Ireland. No-one seems to know

whether the quality of the environment is good, bad or indifferent, so one of our central recom-

mendations was to start the process of publishing a thorough state of the environment report on a

regular statutory basis. We also recommended that that report be aligned with the Irish state of the

environment report so that the people of the island and its governments would see at a holistic level

whether the environment was improving or worsening and whether policy initiatives were having the

appropriate impact.

Our last major area of focus was the question of environmental justice. This is becoming a major

issue in the national and international environmental debate, and has a particularly powerful resonance

for Northern Ireland. As a post-conflict society with severe levels of deprivation, we are experiencing a

stampede for economic recovery and regeneration, while at the same time ever-tougher environmental

decisions have to be taken. In this context of economic and social malaise, the justice implications of

environmental governance decisions will be more and more acute, thus we particularly emphasized the

need for government to focus on how it would anticipate and respond to these implications.

One of the most important aspects of the justice context was the judiciary itself. In Northern Ireland

the culture of the judiciary has been forged through 30 years of responding to and handling serious

violence, so it was difficult for them to see environmental crime as a pressing problem. In England,

Scotland and Wales it has been an issue for some years, but in Northern Ireland, attitudes to

environmental crime are as yet unformed and penalties are considerably lower than in Britain. The

temptation for the regulator is to focus on soft targets, be they individual farmers or smaller essentially

compliant industries, to increase prosecution and enforcement rates, meaning that serious criminals

have often been overlooked. The suite of new powers we recommended would force the regulator and

government to enhance respect for the rule of law. We also suggested that the environmental policy cycle

begin with an environmental justice impact assessment.


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Northern Ireland has some experience of impact assessments. As a result of our particular political

history, we have statutory obligations requiring mandatory equality impact assessments for any new

policy proposals. We suggested that the judiciary build on that expertise and apply it to the environ-

mental justice context, strongly recommending that the regulator be called to account annually to show

how problems were being dealt with. We recommended a new land and environmental tribunal that

would enable the judges to specialize in this complex and growing area of law to assist in counteracting

the established judicial culture.

Another major focus for us was the problem of getting the public and government working together

more proactively. Environmental justice and good environmental decision making depend on effective

public participation. One of the features of the governance relationship that we observed in the course of

our investigation was a mutual disaffection between the public and the government. On the one hand,

government officials complained that the public was simply not interested; on the other, the public

complained that it had been excluded for years, that its views did not count and that there was no point

in trying to get involved.

When Peter Hain’s government was introducing the water charge proposals the public consultation

exercise was truncated by several weeks in order to rush through the new legislation. This led to

successful judicial review proceedings being taken by the Consumer Council in Northern Ireland and a

period of markedly antagonistic relations between the Council and the Department for Regional

Development on this very controversial policy process. We thought this was a good moment to point

out the importance of government investment in, and support for, public participation in the whole

process of environmental governance.

By way of conclusion it is difficult at this point to say what the future holds for Northern Ireland and

the environment. Even though there was perpetual grumbling about direct rule and the need for

devolution, our recent experience of direct rule was actually very positive with regard to the environment.

Peter Hain introduced several significant improvements, not least a Sustainable Development Strategy

that showed a real appetite for change. But there is a definite sense that the newly restored devolved

government is at best ambivalent about the issue of the environment. As I said, our report was com-

missioned by Peter Hain’s administration, and then presented to Arlene Foster as new DUP Minister for

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the Environment. Several months have now passed since the launch and Arlene Foster’s department has

as yet made no commitment concerning any aspect of the report one way or the other.

The DUP is first and foremost a Unionist party, and therefore unlikely to be receptive to a cross-

border agenda. At the same time, however, we have been witnessing unprecedented levels of cordiality

between the principal northern and southern politicians, so anything is possible. The DUP is also a

party with a largely rural constituency, and farmers are vehemently against an independent environ-

ment agency and many of the changes that have been suggested. They see the environmental agenda

as ‘anti-progress’ and are suspicious that it might even be designed to hold them back. So the DUP as

holder of the environment portfolio and dominant political party in Northern Ireland was not a

particularly promising backdrop to the launch of our report.

On a brighter note, all the other key players have received the report positively and manifested a

tremendous appetite for reform.

The Assembly Environment Committee invited us to meet it shortly after the report was published

and has committed to making the report’s implementation one of its priorities for the coming term.

The North South Ministerial Council, one of the major organs created under the Good Friday

Agreement intended to harmonize relations between the Irish and Northern Ireland governments, has

signalled a positive response and shown particular interest in how the environment might be a focus for

all-island governance in a particular range of fields.

Sinn Féin is extremely keen to have not only an environmental protection agency but an all-island

one – which is probably premature given the current political climate, but it does show that there is a

good deal of support for an all-island expert body reporting to both governments and assisting in policy

development.

The Northern Ireland judiciary has also come out strongly in favour of our report. It has

commissioned a series of training exercises for the judiciary and is keen to play its part in the

government process.


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The Northern Ireland Strategic Investment Board, a non-departmental public body tasked with

spending public money on major infrastructure and public services, has also signalled a positive response

and it too wishes to be involved in the debate. It is about to publish the new investment plan for the

region and wishes to align it with many of our recommendations.

Northern Ireland’s Criminal Justice Inspectorate also supports a number of our key recommendations.

Shortly after the publication of our report the Inspectorate published its own serious indictment of the

lack of enforcement of planning and environmental controls, expressing deep concern, in particular,

about the loss to our economy resulting from ex-paramilitary involvement in environmental crime, and

called trenchantly for immediate reform.

At the same time, politics in the Republic of Ireland is changing. For the first time ever, the Green

Party in Ireland now has two Irish ministers: one in the Department of the Environment and one in

Energy. So where Ian Paisley and many northern politicians once looked enviously across the Irish border

at its tiger economy, they now see an economy that, while undoubtedly facing a slow down, has two

Green ministers raising difficult questions about the endemic neglect of the Irish environment. Northern

politicians are starting to hear a different voice from south of the border, and this may help to temper

DUP’s apparent wish to catch up as quickly as possible regardless of environmental issues. Sinn Féin, for

its part, is very focused on a social justice agenda.

In many ways the job for people like myself, the NGOs, and all who are concerned with our

progress, is to persuade local politicians that social justice, economic viability and environmental quality

are all part of the same debate; and while environmental protection will require some hard decisions to

be made, failure to face these challenges will seriously threaten Northern Ireland’s ability to embrace a

sustainable future.

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Professor Sharon Turner

Chair of Environmental Law, Queen’s University, Belfast


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Travelling first class on the TitanicJanuary 2008 Barbara Young

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I always like to quote Sir Crispin Tickell when he was Ambassador to the United Nations: ‘If we are

travelling on the Titanic perhaps we should all go first class.’ Well, I doubt if he really feels we should

party our way to disaster (he is, of course, a good environmentalist), but he raised an important point.

I would like to outline why, in fact, the option of us all travelling first class simply does not exist. I shall

not talk about climate change per se because I think most people are pretty convinced – as indeed are

99 per cent of the scientific community. Climate change is real, human-influenced and, indeed, is

already beginning to show some effects.

The theory that I would like to put forward is also largely accepted, and that is that even if we were to

stop greenhouse gas emissions now, there is enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases already out

there to have serious consequences for the way in which we live. There has been an increasing focus –

political, public and in scientific policy terms – on the issue of reducing emissions. But there has been

rather less on our need to adapt, so I would like to concentrate on some of the major impacts of climate

change in the United Kingdom and how we need to think ahead.

The UK Environment Agency has a particular interest in three major water-related areas: scarcity

driven by an increasingly warm climate, which stimulates greater demand for water both inland and in

coastal areas; flood risk driven by changed weather patterns and sea-level rise; and the consequences of local

and global temperature change for freshwater species and habitats. In addition, there is an overall concern

that these and other effects are likely to hit those in the United Kingdom who are least able to cope.

Let’s start with the basic resource. The most recent research has confirmed that greenhouse gas

emissions are resulting in increased rainfall in and around Europe. There has been a significant rise in mean

precipitation in the United Kingdom during the winter months as well as more intense rain. The UK

Climate Change Programme has established that by the 2080s winters are likely to be as much as 30 per

cent wetter than the norm, especially in some regions. At the same time, summers will be up to 50 per cent

drier, particularly in the south and the east. So though we do not expect to see a huge change in overall

annual rainfall, shifts in seasonal weather patterns are going to be critical.

We are also likely to see more intense events, with rain falling faster and more water running off to be

lost as floodwater, with the accompanying problems of pollution and erosion. Strangely enough, flooding

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at certain times will compound the problems of drought at others, as faster run-off also means that our

aquifers will be less effectively recharged. There will also be big changes in some of our river flows, with

impacts on both the availability and quality of water for human use as well as on biodiversity. Those

effects will be very particular to individual regions. Rivers form differently depending on how and where

they flow, so it is only on a catchment basis that some of the impacts can be predicted.

At the same time as having a change in the availability of water we are going to see increased

pressures on water. On average, domestic water use in the United Kingdom is now 150 litres of water

per capita per day. In addition to overall population growth, we are also in that strange state that

Michael Meacher once described as ‘refugees from marriage’. There are more single-person households

than ever before and, of course, people in single-person households use more water individually than

they would collectively. As we get richer, we take more showers, and often have power showers; we have

bigger baths; and we water our gardens and fill our swimming pools. The per capita demand for water

thus rose by 11 per cent between 1992 and 2003 – a pretty steep rise at a time when we have been

increasingly short of water.

It is very likely that the UK population will continue to grow with the effects of climate change,

putting ever greater demand on resources. This is a difficult issue to raise – even if you are known to be

a good non-racist liberal. The idea of limiting the population is hotly political, and the minute anyone

questions whether there is an ecological limit to human numbers in these tightly packed isles, other

pieces of political philosophy that are far from liberal come into play. So population growth is something

of a minefield in terms of the availability of natural resources – with water being one of them.

Like it or not, if we do see greater desertification and an increase in the barren zones of the tropical

and sub-tropical parts of the world – as indeed is expected – the pressure on people to drift further north

and further south is quite intense. One of the biggest issues for the future in terms of environmental

pressure is just what level of population can be accommodated here. Of course there is plenty of room

in Aberdeenshire, and it may indeed be that climate change is the only thing that would make

Aberdeenshire comfortably inhabitable. But most of the people who come to live in Britain show little

interest in moving to the north, preferring to settle in the midlands and the southeast. So we are going

to have some geographically differential pressures.


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As we said, consumption is increasing and almost half of all water abstractions are for public use. About

55 per cent of that is sensibly used in a domestic setting and about a third is effectively flushed down the

lavatory. But there are also peak-time issues. Domestic use can double or even treble during the hotter

months, while water for agriculture goes from a small to a very large proportion of overall demand in the

summer, just at a time when there is least water around.

It is quite difficult to have a conversation with members of the public about reducing their demand

for water because they immediately ask why they are being pressurized into using it more efficiently

when the water companies’ leakage rates are so high. And there is some truth in this – 40 litres per

property per day, or more than a quarter of an individual’s daily consumption, is lost in leakage. So there

are issues not only in how domestic water is used but also how water providers are going to take action

to become more efficient.

The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has looked at what the impact

of climate change on water use will be if nothing is done to restrain demand. By the 2050s we could see

the requirement for agriculture going up by 25 per cent as the need for irrigation intensifies; we could see

further increases in domestic demand (in spite of our already high level of use) of as much as 4 per cent;

and there is a predicted increase of 6 per cent for industry and commerce, even though these sectors have

made considerable progress in water efficiency over the last two decades.

So the demand for water is continuing to rise at a time when there is going to be rather less usable

water around. Already, some parts of the country have lower water availability per person than in Sudan.

Of course all this is further complicated by ongoing development, particularly in the south and the east.

These are the most water-stressed regions of the United Kingdom, as well as the country’s major growth

points – both traditional and with an eye to creating ecotowns. So development is going to put huge

pressure on our already stressed water systems.

One of the tasks that we are currently undertaking with the government is to predict the

environmental impact of all these new developments in order to determine where they should be

allowed to go ahead, and where there should be measures to control water demand and thereby avoid

the associated infrastructure.

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The pressure of 3 million new homes by 2020 will put very big demands on water supply, and the

solution requires a twin-track approach. One side involves demand management, while the other is about

developing new water resources, all of which needs a long-term planning framework. We currently have

statutory 25-year water plans coming forward from water companies, but we now need to anticipate much

longer time frames of 50 or even 75 years, because that is the sort of period that will see climate change

play out. We need to start preparing now, and we need to take account of demographics and development

alongside climate change impacts. Of course any measures that seek to satisfy water demand must also look

at their own contribution to climate change. Many improvements in both water supply and water

purification treatment result in heavier energy use, and there is absolutely no point in bringing more water

‘on tap’ at the cost of emitting substantial amounts of carbon that will exacerbate the climate problem.

All of that makes the efficiency of the way in which we use water even more important. The more

intelligently we use it, the easier it is both to supply and to treat, and the less carbon intensive it is in terms

of piping, pumping and so on.

Now let me just talk about demand management. It might sound rather abstract, but is really about

how each individual actually uses water. The average Londoner uses 160 litres per person per day, and the

average Berliner 110 litres per person per day. Yet the average Berliner appears to suffer no greater lack of

hygiene than the average Londoner. And if they can do it, then so can we. There are simple ways in which

water efficiency could bring our average usage down to the levels of other developed countries.

The Environment Agency estimates that around 50 per cent of planned growth in population and

housing in the southeast could be catered for by demand-management measures. First of all we are talking

about design, making sure that buildings are not intrinsically water inefficient, with fixtures and fittings

that meet regulatory water efficiency standards. I have been struck when going to look at birds of paradise

in Papua New Guinea – one of the wettest countries in the world – that all the lavatories there are dual

flush. This is because they import them from Australia, which will allow only dual flush installations. Here

in the southeast of England, however, which is a severely water-stressed area, there is absolutely no statutory

requirement for water-efficient systems at DIY outlets or through plumbers. The government has now

acknowledged that we cannot go on like this, so we hope to see ambitious new standards for water-using

appliances as well as an improvement in the standards of fixtures and fittings required by building


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regulations. At present, the government strategy for all new homes sets a level of 125 litres of water per

person per day as regulatory, but this also needs to be tightened up considerably.

There are other ways of reducing water demand. Metering can reduce total domestic water use by

between 10 and 15 per cent, with a considerably larger reduction of around 20 per cent during peak

demand. If such a reduction were achieved, all of the new reservoirs currently proposed by the water

companies would come under serious question. Perhaps they are not required at all. The Environment

Agency is currently consulting on designating a whole range of water-stressed areas in the south and east

of England for compulsory metering over the next 10 years. Such measures mean we could start to see

these savings being achieved.

An educated public can also do a great deal to help. Simple things like turning off the tap while

washing your hands, or not letting your teenage daughter spend 45 minutes in the shower, can make a

huge difference. It is of course highly commendable if you also siphon your bath water into the garden.

The Agency has been examining what water neutrality would look like in the Thames Gateway, one

of the drier parts of the country, if the planned housing developments take place. We are expecting

120,000 new homes in the area over the coming years, and it would not be unreasonable to set the

challenge of achieving that level of construction without increasing water demand at all. That means

building the new houses in a very water-efficient way, but also ensuring that measures are put into the

area’s existing housing stock to reduce demand. There are various options, such as obliging the developers

to retrofit existing stock while installing the most efficient possible systems in the new build. If we can

do this in the Gateway, we can learn a considerable amount about how to tackle the countrywide problem

of water inefficiency in our existing housing stock. The retrofit could be fairly simple, for example low-

flow showerheads and taps, and dual flush systems. Manufacturers of fixtures and fittings are at long last

recognizing that they are going to have to be quite innovative in looking at new ways of bringing forward

water efficiency.

Water efficiency can go a long way to alleviating the problem, but we also need to look at the resource

itself. Essex and Suffolk Water is hoping to extend one of its reservoirs; Thames Water would like to build

a completely new reservoir in Oxfordshire. But the Agency is not wholly enthusiastic about this. We really

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want to use water scarcity as a driver for water efficiency before further disrupting water flows and

habitats. I am always slightly jaundiced when water companies tell me that reservoirs are good for ducks,

because, as many of the ornithologists here could also tell you, we are not short of ducks in this country.

There are other things that we are more short of. So the twin-track approach is genuinely a means to a

track, not just an excuse to build more reservoirs. And let’s not build desalination plants either, because

they are incredibly heavy in energy as well as in effluents.

I would now like to turn to flooding. Just at a time when we worry about not having enough water,

we suddenly discover that we’ve got too much. I once got the Guardian award for the most ridiculous

remark of the year: the accolade came when I launched a water-saving campaign while standing up to the

waist in ice-cold water in my waders during a flood. We did it deliberately because we knew it was the

only way to get coverage – and it certainly worked.

Both the underlying risk and the costs of flooding are on the rise, with the rate of insurance claims

increasing by about 2 to 4 per cent per annum. This is expected to persist as climate change continues to

bite. The government-sponsored foresight study calculated that annual flood damage would rise from

£1.4 billion, the average in 2002, to over £20 billion in 2080 in a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario. The

number of people at risk of flooding will rise from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. The next flood risk

assessment, which will take place following the 2008 publication of the UK climate impact predictions,

will take full account of those predictions and may well produce a much gloomier picture.

We are currently building allowances for climate change into the flood defence measures of the

riverine environment, but these measures only anticipate the average effects of climate change – not the

very great extremes that we are now beginning to see. Meanwhile, climate change impacts on the coast

are compounded by the way in which the land is dropping. Sea-level rise is already under way, with

around a metre of rise expected by the end of the century. And we are seeing increased coastal storm

surges. In November 2007, areas of pressure produced a great dome of water channelling down the

North Sea, funnelling up the estuaries and threatening eastern towns such as Great Yarmouth and

Ipswich, and coming within a hair’s breadth of overtopping our sea defences. The combination of sea-

level rise, coastal deterioration and storm surge is now threatening a very major flood on the east coast,

where erosion is at its worst.


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At the moment we have about 100,000 properties – worth £130 billion – at risk of coastal flooding,

so there is a major need for adaptation even under moderate predictions of sea-level rise. Add to that the

fact that we are also getting wealthier, and the annual economic damage could be as much as a quarter

of a per cent of GDP by the 2080s. That would be a two- to four-fold increase on the losses that we saw

in the summer floods of 2007, and we can expect it to happen every year, so it is really quite serious.

Issues related to floods impacts are multiple. The highest-risk floodplain in the United Kingdom

carries an average risk of flood once in 75 years, and communities can cope with this, but to be flooded

out twice in as many weeks – as happened last summer around Tewkesbury – is disastrous. The water

treatment plant went under water, leaving many with no supply for quite some time, and the electricity

substation almost went the same way. Now had it done so, I think we might have seen the government

fall. Some 750,000 people would have been without energy for more than two weeks. This time it didn’t

happen, but the flood was severe enough for people to begin to think about what it might mean. We rely

so heavily on electronic instruments for our daily lives and work that practically nothing of importance

happens without electricity. If it becomes unavailable for extended periods our entire support system

collapses. And of course it is not just about power and water: railways and roads, hospitals, old peoples’

homes and care homes, schools and food outlets all cease to function. So we need to make sure that those

who have responsibility for running such establishments take climate change into account, think about

the long-term future and start putting adaptation measures in place. Of course heat can be as much of a

problem for our power infrastructure as floods. Most of our electricity substations would cease to function

under sustained summer temperatures of 31ºC, and we are not far from experiencing such temperatures.

So our infrastructure providers need to address the problem with both flood and heat in mind.

Adaptation measures also have to take account of the variability of rainfall. Summer is now seeing

increasingly intense bursts of rain concentrated in small areas, while winter is more prone to steady and

widespread rain over longer periods. One might see sudden flood from above-average run-off; the other

might see rivers and reservoirs gradually filling beyond their capacity. Each can cause floods.

Surface-water run-off is a key issue that nobody seems to want to deal with, partly because of the many

factors involved. After a heavy downpour, it runs off the roads in torrents if these are badly planned; it

pours off farmlands if these have not been managed and tilled in ways that hold water back; it can come

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up from the sewers that belong to the water company; it runs out of people’s driveways; and of course

rapidly overloaded rivers can burst their banks, so the Environment Agency is responsible too.

We currently have a Climate Change Bill going through the House of Lords that aims to put greater

focus on adapting to climate change rather than just measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This

would impose a statutory duty on the providers of critical infrastructure to take climate change into

account in their plans for the future. Government recognizes that this is a real issue, and the Agency is

being given a major role in fully coordinating all involved. This will require working on a local basis with

all relevant organizations: urban planners; road builders; water companies and sewerage works; and the

agricultural sector.

The Mayor of London worked out that an area eight times the size of Hyde Park has been paved over

by people putting tarmac on their front gardens because they need to park their cars somewhere to avoid

congestion charges. The congestion charge is an extremely good idea in carbon terms, but the downside

is an increased risk of flooding as people seek to avoid it. We shall have to think very inclusively to take

such things into account.

Sustainable urban drainage systems (known as SUDS) will involve more porous surfaces that reduce

water flow and harvest rainwater for other purposes. The provision of ponds, lakes and wetlands in city

areas can also facilitate drainage and slow the water’s route to overloaded rivers. There are plenty of

possibilities, but they will all need maintenance in the future and it is unclear who will take ownership

and responsibility.

We also need longer-term plans for our sewerage systems, as currently they are being extended

beyond their capacity. At present, any new developments just add more sewerage pipes on to existing

Victorian infrastructures. But we need 25-year forward planning for our wastewater just as we already

have for our freshwater supply.

Short-term solutions aren’t a solution. Take, for example, the Thames flood embankment. Every time

there has been a major flood in London there has been a decision to rebuild the defences on a bigger scale.

As recently as the 1953 floods, when there was huge loss of life along the Thames in Essex and Kent,


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additions were made to the flood embankment. But we cannot just continue building walls, as very shortly

you will not be able to see the river at all. And, of course, if an enormous surge does pour over the top of

a large defence, it will do even more damage to an area than if there had been no defence at all.

We need to take a much more holistic approach in the way we manage estuaries and catchments so

that the land itself can be used for water storage. We are looking at a wide variety of solutions for

protecting the banks of the Thames. Some strengthening of defences is expected, but over the next three

or four decades we also plan to provide very large-scale wetlands in the outer Thames. These will have a

variety of functions including supporting biodiversity and providing for recreation, and when a really big

flood occurs they can also be allowed to fill up with water – a much more successful way of reducing flood

risk in London than building huge concrete barriers across our estuaries.

There are two more issues to take into account with the question of increasing flood risk – putting

things in the wrong place or designing them in the wrong way. Take, for example, the caravan park at

Hunstanton, which is home to largely retired elderly people and particularly prone to flooding. This is

quite simply the wrong place for elderly people to live. If we have to carry the old ladies of Hunstanton

Caravan Park out of their homes one more time I think they will go crazy.

We need to make sure that strategic processes are applied to ensure the right location for a particular

development. Regional authorities must use strategic flood risk assessments in order to make individual

development control decisions, and only permit development in a floodplain if all other avenues have been

exhausted and if the development itself is not going to create additional flood risk.

It is fair to say that the majority of local authorities make responsible decisions about the location of

new developments. But there are still a few rogues who seem intent on building things in the wrong place.

One that instantly comes to mind is Lincoln City Council, which wants to build 6,000 houses on a site

called Swamp Pool. I think there is a bit of a clue in the title.

On the coast we have big challenges, and increasing pressure to find innovative ways of looking at risk

management. Here it is a case of using rising ground as a natural defence and wetland habitats as a means

of buffering the sea. A programme on ‘Making Space for Water’ that we are currently running with Defra

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provides some answers, even though it is still very small scale. A number of demonstration sites have been

created around the coast, where salt marshes have been recreated to function alongside coastal retreat

programmes. It is on this type of solution that we should increasingly be focusing, making the best possible

use of natural ecosystem services rather than just trying to block the forces of nature. The decision to

abandon coastland is not an easy one. Suffolk MP, John Gummer, has said that for as long as he is an MP

no English soil will be under water. King Canute? I rest my case.

In reality the sea is making its own decisions. There are settlements at the Blythe Estuary that it will

simply not be possible to protect, either economically or practically. Very few communities are comfortable

with that thought, but we hope that by giving them a reasonably long time horizon to adapt, they will

develop strategies to move back from the coast. Some in fact are already making plans. Mablethorpe in

Lincolnshire has recognized that the first two streets running along the coast are simply not defendable,

and are planning developments back from the sea and up the hill.

Let us go back to ‘travelling first class on the Titanic’. Climate change will not affect all parts of the

UK population equally. The poor inevitably come off worst, as many are underinsured or not insured at

all. A stunning 90 per cent of the people who suffered flood damage in Hull last summer had no insurance;

in excess of 10,000 people lost everything.

And of course climate change is not just about water issues. Certain groups are more at risk during heat

waves, particularly older people, babies, and people with heart conditions or respiratory problems. The

summer of 2003 resulted in 2,000 extra deaths, yet the temperatures that caused them could become the

norm by the 2050s, and by the 2080s might even be considered cool. I do not think any of us are going

to be able to travel first class.

Let me just finish with species because we are not the only ones who will be affected. The government-

sponsored Monarch report maps the changes we might expect to what is called ‘climate space’ for a variety

of our species.

We have much to learn about what happens to assemblages of species, because of their

interdependency. There may theoretically be climate space for a certain species, but if its prey species is


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not available at critical points of its breeding or feeding cycles it will not be able to raise its young. Some

– including certain birds and butterflies – are capable of moving, but others are more sedentary. We need

to create environments that give these species the greatest possible opportunity to move as and where they

need to, including conservation landscapes and large tracts of land that enable them to adapt. We also

need to learn to spot the species that are going to be in deeper trouble and decide whether we can do

translocations. This involves the establishment of captive breeding populations to make sure that they

do not die out.

New coastal habitats must be created to replace those lost through coastal squeeze. Some are already

under way: 4,000 hectares of standard arable farmland between Huntingdon and Peterborough, for

example, is being purchased by a consortium of partners to create a big new fenland in Cambridgeshire.

This will join up two small remnant areas of fen, bringing true fenland back to this part of the world for

the first time in a long while. I am really pleased to be on the fundraising committee.

Last but not least, a word about our sponsors, the government. At long last the government has got

the message that all this adaptation stuff is pretty important, and is going to draw up a national adaptation

programme. Two particular things are needed. One is the Climate Change Bill, which will firmly establish

the national adaptation programme so that mechanisms are in place to determine the respective

responsibilities of infrastructure and service providers. The second is an independent adaptation scrutiny

committee. The government is currently working on a climate change committee to scrutinize emissions

reductions programmes, and adaptation to climate change impacts is sufficiently important to necessitate

something similar. We know that our efforts to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions

are way off track, something of which the government is well aware, but this makes the imperative for

adaptation even greater. We need to go further and faster.

We do not have the option of choosing first class or steerage. The reality is that we are in this together

and the impact is going to hit us all. We have got to work to reduce emissions at the same time as taking

account of the need to adapt. If we do a good job on reducing emissions the impacts will be lessened, but

some are unavoidable, and we must be ready for them.

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The economics of climate change February 2008 Lord Adair Turner

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GDP and cost codes may not have the immediate appeal of melting glaciers and polar bears, but it

is the process of economic growth and industrialization that has actually created the challenge of

climate change. So it is important to think about the economics of climate change in order to find

a path to mitigation that will be acceptable to people and at a reasonable cost. I am therefore going

to concentrate primarily on economics, but I want to start with one or two quick comments on

the science.

I want to look at the correlation over time between the two categories of greenhouse gas – carbon

dioxide and methane – and global temperatures. Ice core records for the last 450,000 years show

almost identical patterns of rise and fall in greenhouse gases and temperatures, with surges followed

by more gradual stepped declines. But, as climate change sceptics legitimately point out, they are not

quite simultaneous: temperature starts to rise just before the CO2 and methane concentrations. What

sets off the rise is almost certainly variations in the intensity of solar radiation due to certain features

of our orbit around the sun, and the sceptics use these data to dismiss theorists who say that carbon

levels drive temperature change.

The fact that the almost simultaneous growth pattern in CO2 and temperature is started by a shift

in temperature should not, however, be a cause for reassurance. Movements in both temperature and

greenhouse gas emissions are far larger than can be explained by the original stimulus of variations in

radiation. What is actually going on is that a small exogenous stimulus is then being amplified by a set

of effects which are internal to the climate process, with hugely magnified results.

Over the last century or so, a large exogenous anthropogenic input has pushed levels of atmos-

pheric greenhouse gases way beyond the historical pattern. We are not just on the edge but beyond it,

breaking out of at least half a million years of historical variation.

Indeed we are going back to levels of CO2 and greenhouse gases that have not been seen for 10 or

20 million years. What is really interesting in the long-term paleoclimatology record is that if you go

back 60 million years, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are massively higher than they are at the

moment. There seems to have been a process spanning 50 million years when atmospheric CO2

essentially left the atmosphere and ended up as fossil fuel.

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What we are now doing is putting fossilized carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. If we

continue with business as usual and release all the stored carbon that we know to exist, in particular the

coal, we will release about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon, which could easily drive total concentrations of

CO2 in the atmosphere not just to 600 or 700 parts per million (ppm) but way up to 1,500 or 2,000.

It would take us a couple more hundred years to get there, but that gives us an idea of the scale of what

we are doing. Its impact on temperature would probably take thousands of years to work through rather

than just centuries. We would return to a dramatically different climate.

There have been very big temperature declines over the past 50 million years, in the region of 8 or

10ºC. When all that carbon was in the atmosphere rather than in fossil fuels there were no polar ice

sheets. The sceptics are absolutely right to say that the historical record does not show a stable climate,

but it is precisely the variability of the past climate that should worry us when we think about the future.

One of the complexities of the science and economics of climate change is that we frankly do not know

how they will play out once the feedback loops have produced an effect.

Depending on where we are in the range of scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC), our burning of fossil fuels could take the global average temperature to

somewhere between 2 and 6 degrees higher than the pre-industrial level by the end of the century. As

Professor John P. Holdren at Harvard University has said, ‘continuation of recent trends… leads by

2100 to temperatures not reached since the Eocene (25-35 million years ago), when sea level was 20 to

30 metres higher.

Now because of the inertia in the system, it takes an extremely long time for sea levels to adjust to

atmospheric temperature increases. So it is reasonable to say that if we take a long approach to this –

rather than that of my colleagues in the financial services industry who consider the long term as about

a year – we have an environment on the edge.

So what has all this to do with economics and growth? Does it mean that we have to give up the

idea of material prosperity, growth and consumption? Is the crisis such that there is no point in running

fancy economic models? I do not think so, either in terms of the economic analysis or in terms of the

implications for growth. Firstly, economics has quite a lot to tell us about how we should respond and


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the most cost-effective ways of doing so. Secondly, I do not actually believe that significantly mitigating

climate change will require us to give up the benefits of material prosperity. The sacrifice needed is in

fact quite slight.

It is almost impossible now to stop the world’s climate going up by 2ºC, maybe even 2.5ºC. We

have released such quantities of a number of greenhouse gases that there is no reverse gear. The debate

now is about what action we can take to ensure that temperatures do not rise by 4 or 5ºC. The

economics of climate change really matters.

What exactly is the economics of climate change? An economist would summarize it thus: compare

through time the economic and social cost of climate change and assign an economic value to its adverse

consequences; identify the costs of mitigating climate change; identify the costs of adapting to climate

change because we might choose to adapt rather than mitigate; and, of course, maximize net present

value. We maximize the net present value of human welfare by taking into account the changing pattern

of costs through time and using an appropriate discount rate to compare the value of different people’s

welfare at different points in time. That is the economics of climate change, which turns out to be a

rather difficult thing to do.

There are many economists who have tried to cover all sides of the problem using what are called

integrated assessment models. These take all the different costs at different periods of time and plug in

discount rates, and come up with a result. One of the problems with this type of modelling is that it is

so complicated that it’s hard to know how to respond to the results. There are so many assumptions

written into every line of the model that you cannot actually get a handle on whether the assumptions

are sufficiently robust to be meaningful. It is a very complex challenge.

First you have to establish what our emissions of greenhouse gases will be as we go into the future.

For this, you have to estimate GDP growth, the energy intensity of GDP growth, and the carbon

intensity of energy. These are the scenarios for emissions and this is where economists play an

important role. Then you have to turn emissions into stocks of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,

which is actually one of the easiest steps because it involves the straightforward physics of the

dissipation of gases in the atmosphere. What is really tricky is working out whether 350ppm of

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atmospheric carbon – or 400 or 500ppm – relates to a particular temperature level. That theory has

huge uncertainties.

Then you need to go from the average global temperature to regional climates and anticipate what

is going to happen to temperatures and rainfall in particular areas. That is even trickier, but you need

to get to that point in the calculations before you can begin to identify the economic and social

consequences. What does it mean for crop yields, for peoples’ health or for their way of life?

The relationships between atmospheric carbon and global temperature are non-linear, and we do not

currently have – I suspect never shall have – absolute certainty about exactly what level of cumulative

atmospheric carbon will produce what global temperature. What we do have is uncertain probability.

The best the scientists can do is give us probability distributions of the likely concentration of CO2

at which we must stabilize if we are to avoid going above a certain rise in temperature. The Hadley

Centre has calculated that if we stabilize at 550ppm we have a 99 per cent probability of a temperature

increase greater than 2ºC but only a 24 per cent probability of an increase greater than 4ºC.

We have to realize that we are always going to be dealing with a famous distinction made by Frank

Knight, the well-known economist, between uncertainty and risk. We are not dealing with a precisely

modellable risk where we can say definitively that the probability distribution results are XYZ. What we

have is an uncertain judgement as to what a probability distribution is, and that is a tricky thing to deal

with when you are trying to optimize your course of action. In terms of anthropogenic greenhouse gas

emissions, it means that the effect on temperature can only ever be uncertain.

One thing we can be fairly sure of is that due to amplifications within the science (such as ice-melt

reducing the planet’s albedo, which in turn increases ice-melt), there are feedback loops which make the

relationship between our emissions and the climate’s response non-linear. But we are never going to

know precisely what that non-linear function is.

When we think about the adverse social consequences of climate change we have a problem in that

they come in many different categories. Some are quite easy to work out, at least conceptually, in terms

of GDP equivalent – for example the cost of building a flood defence system, the economic losses


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associated with changes in crop yield, or the cost of three times the usual number of hurricanes. Others,

however, require a value judgement – for example the value of human welfare when it comes to heat

waves, the spread of tropical diseases or coastal zones going under water. It is the conceptually

‘containable’ effects that can be – and have been – put through integrated assessment models by

economists. The bigger impacts are much harder to assess.

Then there are what are called contingent effects, which are incredibly difficult to value. If the

regional effect of global warming is to lead to a sudden movement in the Sahara desert, producing lower

agricultural yields in places like Niger, then you have increased poverty. The net overall effect of that

both on measured GDP and on human welfare could be massively higher than what you would

anticipate simply looking at agricultural yields.

Finally, you have entirely subjective judgements such as the aesthetic or spiritual value of species and

the landscape itself. One of the reasons why economists produce hugely varying estimates when trying to

work out the costs of climate change (Sir Nicholas Stern said as much as 20 per cent of GDP; William

Nordhaus said as low as 1 or 2 per cent), is the difficulty of where the cut-off point lies across these different

categories of effects. Once again, we have non-linearity. A 4ºC temperature increase would be far more

than twice as bad as a 2ºC temperature increase. But at what point does the ability to adapt break down,

and of what and for whom? If you want to put non-linearity into a model you have to turn it into some

sort of equation. Frankly, we are just guessing at what kind of equation can express non-linearity.

We also have a great debate about discount rates. This is a somewhat esoteric issue. The range of debate,

which is between a discount rate of 2 per cent and one of 4 per cent, may not sound very big. But the

thing about compound interest is that pursued over 150 years the difference between 2 per cent and 4 per

cent is transformational. What value should you place today on a £1,000 detriment in 2150? With a 4 per

cent real discount it is worth £3.67 today, but with a 2 per cent discount it is worth £59.00 today. So how

you trade off the value of the future versus the costs of the present depends very much on the discount

rate. Discount rates really are quite fundamental, and it is not surprising that they have been debated.

Finally, in amongst the layers of complexity already outlined, there is a problem in that the impact

of climate change almost certainly varies very significantly in different parts of the world. The IPCC’s

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Working Group II Report, which sets out the impact of climate change on ecosystems and human life,

tells very different stories for different regions. For Africa there are projected reductions in crop yield of

– in some countries – as much as 50 per cent by 2020, and crop net revenues falling by as much as 90

per cent by 2100. The population at risk of increased water stress is projected to be between 350 and

600 million by the 2050s. In Europe, however, all we need to worry about is the likelihood that winter

floods will increase in coastal zones and that flash floods will increase throughout the region. And winter

tourism in mountain regions is expected to face reduced snow cover. Well, we have seen some flooding

already and can probably adapt and deal with it. So we are really talking about the trade-off between

our skiing holidays being disrupted and quite a lot of people in Africa dying.

If you look at the IPCC’s figures for the additional population at risk of hunger in the next 50 years,

they expect there to be tens or even hundreds of millions of people at risk in Africa, but none in

northwest Europe because even if we had to deal with considerable climate change, we are a rich

developed society with some capacity. There are two things going on here. First, the hotter countries are

more vulnerable to slight increases in heat. If the temperature in the United Kingdom went up by 3ºC

it would be a different climate but it would not be an impossible one. In parts of India or Africa another

3ºC makes it quite unsuitable for human life.

This means that the economics of climate change is heavily influenced by ethical issues of what

relative weight you attach to harm in one country or in another, or indeed to sacrifices that the

developed world may have to make versus the harm that the developing world could face.

Sir Nicholas Stern’s report concluded that if we do not act, the overall costs and risks of climate

change will be equivalent to losing at least 5 per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a

wider range of risks and impacts are taken into account, the loss could rise to 20 per cent. In contrast,

the cost of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change are

around 1 per cent per annum. I have read Nick’s report, and been involved and debated it, and

concluded that for all the uncertainties, its overall conclusion is completely robust. A reasonable

assessment of the potential damage says it is really very big. Nick’s own figures concur that it is

inherently difficult to decide whether you place a value of 5 or 20 per cent on the costs of inaction.

Either way, it is much bigger than the cost of mitigation, and at least we have a higher degree of


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certainty regarding the cost of mitigation – I would argue that a reasonable estimate is around 1 to 2

per cent of GDP.

So, why did Nick Stern conclude that it could be limited to 1 per cent of GDP and, indeed, why is

that the figure that most economists who have looked at the challenge come up with? It seems sur-

prisingly small when you think about the scale of the changes that we need to bring about.

If we are to have a chance of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at something like 500 to

550ppm (versus 380 today and 280 in the pre-industrial era), then an appropriate abatement scenario

would see emissions peaking in around 2020 and then declining by something like 20 or 30 per cent

relative to current levels by 2050. This is 60 to 70 per cent lower than what we might expect in a

‘business-as-usual’ scenario. Of course these are global figures, so the developed world will have to make

even greater emissions cuts to allow – at least for a while – for some growth in the developing world.

China’s per capita emissions are currently about half of European levels and about a fifth of US

levels. India’s are still only an eighth of European levels. The International Energy Agency estimates that

China’s per capita emissions will double by 2050 to reach current European levels. If we assume that

poorer economies are necessarily going to increase their emissions as they grow richer, the challenge for

the developed world in any reasonable abatement scenario is to cut its emissions by something like 60

to 80 per cent against the current level. Indeed, in 2000, the UK Royal Commission on Environmental

Pollution recommended cutting emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.

This target is also written into the Climate Change Bill set up by the Climate Change Committee,

though one of the Committee’s current tasks is to report by December 2008 on whether that target

should be not 60 per cent but 80 per cent. Some people would say 90 per cent. Either way, running our

economy on upwards of 60 per cent less carbon and other greenhouse gases than we currently do sounds

like an impossible challenge. But there are good reasons to believe not only that it is technologically

feasible, but that it can be done at a manageable economic cost.

One way to think about technological feasibility is a rather useful analysis presented by Professor

Socolow at Princeton University. It is well known as the ‘Socolow Wedges’. Total annual carbon

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emissions are around 7 gigatonnes (around 25 gigatonnes as carbon dioxide). Under current trends this

will rise to 14 gigatonnes by mid-century. To flatten the slope over the coming decades would require

removing 7 gigatonnes from the trajectory. But flattening it is not enough; emissions need to begin a

downward trend. How can this be made manageable? What Socolow and his team came up with was

the idea of imagining every gigatonne on the 50-year trajectory as ‘a wedge’ – which, indeed, is what it

looks like on a simple line graph. They asked what would have to be done to take out a wedge of 1

gigatonne, and compiled a list of actions, each of which can remove a 1-gigatonne wedge using

technologies which are not gleams in the eye of scientists in the lab, but – with some exceptions – exist

at some cost today:

� Increase fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60mpg.

� Decrease travel for 2 billion 30mpg cars from 10,000 to 5,000 miles per year.

� Cut carbon emissions from buildings and appliances by 25 per cent.

� Double the existing capacity of nuclear power.

� Switch natural gas for coal for 1,400 gigawatts of electricity generation.

� Introduce carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 800 gigawatt coal stations.

� Introduce CCS at fossil-based hydrogen plants while increasing capacity 10-fold.

� Introduce CCS at coal-to-synfuels plants producing 30 million barrels per day.

� Increase wind-power capacity 50-fold.

� Increase solar photovoltaic capacity 700-fold.

� Increase the 2004 Brazilian ethanol production 100-fold.

� Reduce deforestation to zero, plus reforestation, afforestation and new plantations.

� Apply conservation tillage to all cropland.

I shall comment on a few of them.

With regard to vehicle fuel efficiency, the middle of this century will see something like 2 billion

cars in the world. The business-as-usual assumption is that they will run at around 30mpg. If every

single one of them – or the average of all of them – could achieve 60mpg, that would represent a 1-

gigatonne emissions saving. This is not impossible. You can buy cars today that with careful driving

give you that sort of fuel consumption. One of the great effects of the Toyota Prius – amongst other


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modern cars – is that it gives you a continual count of your fuel consumption, and drivers with

counters tend to have a little game with themselves to increase their mpg. With technological progress

over the next few years, an average of 60mpg for all cars is an achievable target.

Halving the distances we travel in private vehicles is probably a bit more difficult. But rising fuel

costs will have an impact, and urban design focused on efficient mass transport systems brings it into

the realms of the possible.

The nuclear issue is probably controversial, but if we triple the present capacity to 1,050 gigawatts,

that is another gigatonne of carbon emissions saved. Gas for coal substitution is feasible, at least until

we can get real renewables up and running.

Coal is a much dirtier fuel than gas in CO2 terms, so carbon capture and storage is an absolutely

vital technology. Whether we like it or not, the Chinese are building huge numbers of coal-fired power

stations, so unless we develop and make economic the technology to capture that carbon and store it in

geological strata, we are not going to succeed.

We need 50 times as much wind power as at present. That is a huge task, but not impossible. This

is true of pretty well all of the actions suggested above.

I think that there are two main conclusions to draw from this list. First of all, it is feasible. Second,

it has to be a combination of these things: you cannot just bank on one.

You might be in favour of nuclear power and happy to treble current capacity, but you cannot

multiply that up to solve the problem because you will run out of uranium. As stated, 50 times as much

wind power is doable, but try covering all our energy needs with wind power and you will run out of

places to put windmills. Biomass may have a contribution to make, but if you try to do the whole thing

with biofuel – unless we get real breakthroughs in technology that allow us to grow biomass in desert

areas or new ways of producing it in laboratories – it will be at the expense of food production. Indeed,

half of what is going on in food prices at the moment throughout the world is the competition from

bioethanol, unfortunately produced in an incredibly environmentally unsustainable fashion as a result

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of the American subsidy regime. This may have started as an environmental proposition, but it has

turned into yet another way to make Iowan farmers significantly richer. Iowa, of course, has a rather

large role in the American electoral system because it holds its caucases before anyone else.

The list is feasible, but it does not tell us anything about the costs. Do all these carbon savings cost

far too much for the economy to absorb? Actually, the answer is no. All the best analyses say that doing

a mix of these or other actions is much more likely to be 1 or 2 per cent of GDP than 5, 6, 7 or 8. I

would argue that even if it were 5, 6, 7 or 8 – or even 20 – we should still do it. Fortunately, that does

not seem to be necessary.

To put 1 to 2 per cent of UK GDP in context, it is somewhere in the region of £14 to 28 billion.

Over the next 50 years, on the UK Treasury’s medium forecast, the country’s per capita GDP is likely

to go up by about 2.4 times. The cost of a 60 per cent emissions cut is only around 0.3 to 2 per cent of

GDP. Now in terms of our rising living standards, this means that rather than achieving the rise we

might expect in January 2050 with no emissions cuts, we will have to wait until November of that year.

This does not seem a major threat to our material prosperity.

But is it believable? What does it actually mean for people’s way of life? Of course lifestyles will have

to change, but some of these are at no real cost at all. In fact they might even be positive. Here in the

United Kingdom, as well as on my business travels, I continually find that buildings are either

overheated or air-conditioned to the point of necessitating an extra layer of clothing. But the choice to

standardize temperatures at 18, 20 or 22 degrees is completely arbitrary. Turning down the heating in

winter and raising the temperature in summer by a couple of degrees is easy to adapt to, but can have

a huge impact on the carbon emissions figures.

Similarly, if people can be persuaded to get out of their cars and take public transport or bike to

work there is nil cost. GDP does not go down; incomes do not go down. What happens is that people

have more money to spend on other things, and their overall well-being may well go up. Quite apart

from the potential benefits to health and fitness, there is a considerable benefit to be enjoyed from the

‘smugness factor’. A cyclist cannot help but feel superior as he or she cycles past people stuck in a traffic

jam in their SUVs. There is a consumer value in smug superiority.


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There are lots of ways in which we can change our lifestyle that have no measurable effect on GDP

but can save a lot of carbon. How many of them we are actually willing to do is one of those tricky

questions that cannot really be answered. We on the Climate Change Committee will have to think

about what assumptions we can make and how we can model them in.

Moving on from nil-cost emissions savings to nil- to low-cost ones, actual numbers become a bit

more accessible. There is a whole set of opportunities in households and companies to improve energy

efficiency, such as improving insulation, which might cost a little bit up front, but gives a positive rate

of return. The Carbon Trust has estimated that in UK manufacturing, about 10 to 20 per cent of

emissions can be cut while giving a return of more than 15 per cent – and of course we can do this

at home.

Fluorescent light bulbs may cost four times as much as incandescent ones, but at 11 watts rather

than 60, they produce the same amount of lumens while using 80 per cent less electricity. And of course

they last much longer, so over three or four years of use there is a positive net value. Now it might seem

a bit ‘nerdish’ to spend the evenings calculating the value of investments in light bulbs, but it is only

when we do the calculations that we see the opportunities – and there are plenty. One of the things that

has to be worked out by the Climate Change Committee is to identify those opportunities, figure out

how reliable they are and how they can be achieved.

There are also things that will cost us money. Pretty well all renewable energies that we know about

do have a cost penalty over fossil fuels, but for many of them we are talking about a cost penalty of an

additional 30 or 40 per cent, not 300 or 400 per cent. It is not prohibitive.

Just look at this simple calculation (sometimes in economics, simple calculations tell you more than

complicated integrated assessment models). Total energy costs as a percentage of GDP are now about

4 or 5 per cent. In a business-as-usual scenario, putting aside any impact that energy efficiency measures

might have, that will probably fall to 2 or 3 per cent by 2050. Now suppose that energy in a renewable

form might cost 50 per cent more, that extra 50 per cent on the cost is actually only an extra 1.5 per

cent of GDP. That kind of order-of-magnitude calculation tells us that even if we pursue carbon

emissions in a relatively inefficient fashion, it still won’t cost all that much.

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To run it another way, we can produce gas electricity or nuclear electricity at 3p per kilowatt hour,

and onshore wind at around 6p per kilowatt hour. So there is a cost penalty of 3p per kilowatt hour.

Our total electricity consumption in the United Kingdom is about 300 to 350 terawatt hours or 300

billion kilowatt hours. Multiply the 3p cost penalty by 300 billion terawatt hours and you get a cost

penalty of £9 billion. Expressed as billions of pounds it sounds like an enormous cost, but it is actually

only 0.6 per cent of GDP, so not such a great sacrifice of material prosperity.

Overall, I am optimistic that this is doable at reasonable cost, but there is a huge amount of work if

the Climate Change Committee and government are actually to deliver it. I have set out an optimistic

picture of the economic feasibility; pulling the policy levers to make it happen is a bit more complicated.

I have already mentioned emissions mitigation measures that economists have worked out to be at

zero net cost, such as additional insulation in buildings, low fuel consumption vehicles and the like –

all of which are basically energy efficiency measures. These are things that fall below the x axis on a cost

curve. They don’t need carbon tax incentives, because they are enough of an incentive in themselves.

But if they are positive NPV (net present value) projects, why have they not been done already?

It was once said that if an economist sees a £10 note on the street, he/she will not pick it up because

if it were genuine it would have been picked up already. These projects have not been grasped because

there is a hidden cost in actually thinking about them. Thinking about them is in itself a cost. If, for

example, you are refurbishing your house, you might want to install energy-efficient light bulbs or

additional insulation or triple glazing, but your builder will probably roll his eyes at you because it’s not

what he usually does. So you don’t get round to it.

There is a paradox here in that one of the biggest problems is just how cheap energy is. The main

reason that people replace incandescents with fluorescents is not that they have done the calculations; it

is because they feel that it is better for the environment. It is an ethical decision. Energy is so cheap that

we are not forced to count every penny that we spend on it and figure out how to make savings. For

those of middle income and above, electricity consumption is not a big part of the household budget,

and small savings are of little interest. You might as well just have a glass of wine and a relaxed evening

rather than do the calculations.


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This is also true of the commercial sector. If you are running a large commercial building like an

office site in Central London, the energy inputs to running the business are 4 per cent or even less of

your total costs. In some industries, like chemicals, steel or aluminium, energy inputs are such a large

proportion of the total cost of production that professional managers will have seized all the oppor-

tunities to squeeze out extra energy efficiency. Even then, they will have concentrated on the production

process, not on the relatively very small costs of running their offices. There are plenty of commercial

businesses, both large and small, with so many other things to worry about that positive NPV energy

projects get ignored amongst the general pressures.

In terms of the complexities of switching to renewable energy, one of the challenges here is to work

out the cost penalty, and the key difficulty is that the cost penalty is not an exogenous given. It is in

itself an endogenous given affected by public policies. The cost of moving, for instance, to wind power

– whether onshore or offshore – or tidal power is crucially dependant on how fast we choose to make

the change, because the costs are determined by a different form of cost curve. It is a ‘decline with

experience’ curve, where in many technologies the more that you produce of something the more the

costs come down. That creates an interesting challenge for policy makers. Do we simply wait for these

things to happen? Do we believe that by choosing to go further and faster in the direction of renewables

we will automatically affect the cost penalty and bring it down?

The key thing is that just as we need many technology levers, we also need many policy levers. One

of the policy levers that people talk about – and again it is of immediate interest to economists – is

carbon pricing, either through a taxation regime or through a trading regime such as the European

Commission’s Carbon Trading Scheme. This involves creating a charge for emitting carbon, and some

people think that’s as much as we should do: setting a carbon track and trade system and allowing it to

do the work. In some sectors – particularly energy-intensive ones – it will work. If we face a steel mill

plant not only with the cost of fuel but also with a charge for emitting carbon, we will intensify yet

further the search for energy efficiency. But we can only rely on the market to work in that case because

the costs are large and there are professional managers focusing on it. Similarly, we may – albeit

debatably – affect transport demand through crisis. And we will certainly affect renewable energy

development if we increase the cost of burning fossil fuels – the relative cost of building a wind farm

goes down as the relative cost of burning fossil fuels goes up. But without a dramatic increase in the cost

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of electricity, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to people’s decisions about light bulbs or

insulation, whether at home or in business. That means that there is a significant role to play in policy

and regulation.

I don’t think we are going to make the shift from incandescents to fluorescents and then to

lighting-emitting diodes (LEDs, which produce the same amount of lumens with 1 watt as an

incandescent does with 11 watts) through a carbon price. We can only achieve that sort of switch

through regulation, by saying there is a date beyond which it is illegal to sell an incandescent bulb.

Similarly, building regulations are key drivers of whether or not people will insulate buildings.

Automotive emissions probably have to be driven down by agreements with the car industry on the

average fuel economies of the corporate car fleet – which do exist on the European level. Consumer

information alone is not enough.

Finally, we may also have to pull a price deal on technology support and subsidy. If the cost of

technology comes down as a result of the volume of its production, we may want to intervene in two

ways: driving the technology out of the research lab and into development by pump priming the research,

or deliberately subsidizing it over the hump to get it up to a scale whereby the cost comes down.

Let me finally talk about what the United Kingdom is doing and whether it’s doing enough. The

UK has now made a set of target commitments which are in international agreements or in stated

government policy, and some are now legally binding within the Climate Change Bill. Under the Kyoto

Protocol the country made a legally binding commitment to reduce average annual greenhouse gas

emissions (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons

and sulphur hexafluoride) by 12.5 per cent relative to 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. We

already have a domestic CO2 goal of 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010, and under the Climate

Change Bill, we have also written into law a 60 per cent domestic reduction by 2050. The Bill also

requires the government to set five-year carbon budgets. The third carbon budget, for the period 2018-

2022, must see carbon emissions in the range of 26 to 32 per cent below 1990 levels.

So in terms of legal commitments we are doing quite well. These are quite stretching commitments

and we have a set of policies, taxes and trading schemes in place, including a fuel duty escalator and a


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climate change levy, the EU Emission Trading Scheme and renewable obligation certificates. In terms

of regulatory and voluntary commitments, we have building regulations and European appliance

labelling, automotive voluntary commitments and supplier obligation. In fact, we have a panoply of

measures set out in the government climate change programme.

In terms of the Kyoto Protocol we will more than meet the target that we committed to on reducing

greenhouse gases. We did a reasonable job of reducing our non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions – in

particular major reductions in methane from landfill sites – and we reduced our CO2 emissions in the

1990s as we switched from coal to natural gas. But CO2 reductions have since flattened out, and we are

now way off target for any of our stated targets.

So we need to do more, and there is more in the climate change programme – in the areas of taxes

and trading, appliance and building regulation, information and technology support – that the

government says will take out 23.4 to 33 million further tonnes of emissions from the present annual

level. However, even if it achieves the higher end of that range – 33 rather than 23.4 – we will only just

achieve the lower end of the target. So even with the higher end of the policy levers that we are now

pulling we can only achieve a 26 per cent reduction, not the 32 per cent reduction considered necessary.

We clearly need to do much more.

The world is now at the potentially fruitful stage of making a raft of declarative and, in some cases,

legal commitments. The European Union has committed to a 20 per cent unilateral cut in greenhouse

gases by 2020, rising to 30 per cent if others can agree during negotiations, and has committed to a 20

per cent renewable energy target by 2020, which is actually very stretching. The leading presidential

candidates of the United States of America are all committed to some category of cap and trade system.

California has made quite strong legal commitments to a 25 per cent cut by 2020, and has an aspiration

of 80 per cent by 2050. The French are talking about a 75 per cent cut by 2050. And with regard to

the Kyoto Protocol, we now have the Bali agreement to negotiate follow-on commitments. So, we are

making progress in terms of commitments, but so far this is not translating into the results that we need.

The abatement scenario that I mentioned earlier had the total level of global emissions beginning a

downward trend from 2020 onwards. But the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook

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predicts an ongoing rise in emissions beyond 2020, even with all policy levers in place. It concludes that

the number and strength of policies under consideration continues to grow faster than the number and

strength of policies actually adopted, reflecting a growing concern but more talk than action.

In conclusion, we know that we can cut emissions at an acceptable cost to the economy, but we need

to do much more with regard to policy, and we also need to bring in the most rapidly growing

developing countries as well. The Chinese are taking steps on energy efficiency, but when you talk to

them about emissions cuts they are still unwilling to enter into debate because, as they point out, their

per capita emissions are still at half our level. The problem is that even if we manage to cut our own

emissions by 2020, China may have overtaken us in per capita emissions, let alone in absolute emissions.

There is an immensely important challenge to persuade the leading developing nations, above all China,

that they also have a long-term interest.


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Lord Adair Turner, former Director-General, Confederation of British Industry

Chair of the Committee on Climate Change

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Creating a healthy environment in ChinaProfessor Sian Griffiths March 2008

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As Co-Chair of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) enquiry for the Hong Kong government,

I was made highly aware not only of the global public health challenges we face today, but in particular

the public health challenges faced by China – and Hong Kong as part of China. SARS demonstrated

that the fight against infectious disease entails not just the clinical aspects of disease control, but also the

conditions in which food is produced, the design of our housing and the need for occupational safety.

Following the work with the government, I was invited to the School of Public Health of the

Chinese University of Hong Kong where I now work, which has given me new perspectives on the

challenges the environment poses for the health of populations in our part of the world.

Necessarily, my account today will be impressionistic. I have to emphasize that I am not an expert

on environmental health, and I want to thank my colleagues at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

School of Public Health, and Professor Shelly Tse in particular, for their help preparing materials for

this lecture.

I will start with some definitions and descriptions, and then go on to consider the physical

environment and the health issues relevant to safe water, air, food and occupation, referring to the

economic transition which has created a huge migrant work force, and the new challenges for those

concerned with creating a healthy population.

Definitions

When we consider health, we do not think just about doctors and illness but about ‘wellness’. If we

use the World Health Organization (WHO) definition – ‘Health is a state of complete physical,

mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ – then the scope for

creating a healthy environment is clearly not limited to hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, but includes

the myriad factors that influence health: agriculture and food, education, housing, employment status

and working environment, water and sanitation, and health care services, as well as hereditary factors

and lifestyle choices such as smoking.

A historical analysis of public health tells us that we need to be aware of all these factors, and the

influence of the environment does not just involve the conditions in which we work and live – whether

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we have water, sanitation, good housing or health-promoting workplaces – but also how we live our

day-to-day lives, and how we communicate with and support each other within our societies. High-

rise tower blocks in Hong Kong may be less conducive to children going out to play in the park, as

mothers will be anxious about letting them go on their own, predisposing them not only to less

physical activity and a greater chance of obesity but also to psychological stress.

Thus environmental influences can be social, physical, economic and political. I will focus on the

physical but briefly touch on the others, as it is not possible to discuss health in China without doing so.

Mainland China has a population of 1.31 billion people living in 22 provinces, five autonomous

regions and four municipalities. Since 1949, there have been tremendous advances in the health of the

people. The two indicators used to reflect the health and well-being of a country are life expectancy

and infant mortality. In both of these areas China has made terrific strides forward. The average life

expectancy of a Chinese citizen, for example, rose from just 35 years in 1949 to 70 in 1997. By 2004

a resident of Shanghai might have expected to live to 80.

This has been brought about by an increase in national wealth (China’s current annual rate of GDP

growth is around 8-10 per cent), and this has seen areas such as the Pearl River Delta expand at an

amazing pace to become a production centre for the world. In the late 1970s Shenzhen, for example,

was a sleepy rural area with a population of around 370,000 farmers and fishermen. Today, the

population is 12 million and growing, comprising 2 million permanent residents, 6.5 million

temporary residents and a large floating migrant population.

While 60 per cent of China’s population is in rural areas, rapid urbanization due to industria-

lization and marketization has led to a huge migrant population. The impact on health has been

mixed, with diseases of affluence emerging in the richer eastern cities where obesity is increasing; while

in the rural west, poverty-related diseases are still having an impact. Health inequalities continue to

exist, with life expectancy a good 10 years longer in the cities than in the most impoverished rural

areas, and infant mortality almost 10 times higher in the most impoverished rural areas than in the

larger cities. As the economic boom continues, disparities in resource allocation also continue to grow,

with a disproportionate effect on the nation’s health.

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Unrestricted economic and industrial development has caused a deterioration in the environment

as the impact and demands of economic growth put stresses on infrastructure and produce harmful

side effects. The consequence for well-being is that the health gains of a more affluent society are

counterbalanced by the impact of environmental pollution – which is causing increasing morbidity

and mortality, and putting stress not only on the inadequate health care system but on people’s pockets

– to the extent that paying medical bills is the most common cause of people going into poverty. In a

2007 survey medical concern topped the league of social concerns. I want to focus on the impact of

the physical environment on health and the challenges this poses by looking at five themes: air, water,

food, the working environment and climate change.

How safe is our air?

In 2008 Beijing is to host the Olympics and, as everyone is aware, there is great concern about the

health implications for the athletes, such that there is even the potential of rescheduling the games, or

at least some events. Air pollution has become a major concern – particularly for its impact on quality

of life. There are countless pictures of smog in our cities, not least in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong

Kong. We seldom see a clear sky, and of 585 cities surveyed in 2006, only 38 per cent registered air

quality that reached national health standards, down from 45 per cent in a 2005 study. Air pollution

is a direct result of uncontrolled rapid economic growth. Its sources are combustion of gasoline and

other hydrocarbon fuels in growing numbers of cars, trucks and aeroplanes.

And then there are the sources of indoor pollution, for example the burning of fossil fuels, with

coal still the major source of energy for much of China. In addition, much domestic cooking makes

use of wood alongside fossil fuels, contributing to indoor air pollution. Indoor pollution is exacerbated

by the high rates of smoking among men (60 per cent) and recent figures show that smoking continues

to rise amongst the younger population. While efforts are being made to stem the tide, there is a long

way to go and major considerations such as tobacco production and tax revenue need to be actively

addressed. Other sources of air pollution include insecticides and herbicides, radioactive fallout and

dust, especially from construction and industrial processes.

While there have been some attempts in Hong Kong to control sources of pollution such as outdoor

burning, which has been banned since 1996, comparisons between the pollutant concentrations in cities

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of the Pearl River Delta and other international conurbations show that levels are woefully high. Many

expatriates are leaving Hong Kong, citing the poor air quality as their reason – including the conductor

of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Edo de Waart, whose son was suffering from asthma.

Studies in our schools have shown increased hospitalization associated with air pollution.

How safe is our water?

Water is a prerequisite for life – and clean water a prerequisite for health. China faces a major challenge

in providing clean water to its citizens. Many water sources are becoming polluted and industrial

wastewater has led to 70 per cent of the water in five major river systems being unsuitable for human

use. At present it is estimated that 700-800 million people are drinking contaminated water on a daily

basis. Communities along the major river systems are beginning to show the harmful effects and there

have been reports of increased rates of cancers, stunted growth, spontaneous abortion and also a

negative impact on IQ.

The village of Shangba in Guangdong province is just one example of the problems that can be

created by water pollution. Here a government-owned mineral mine and other privately owned smaller

mines dumped toxic waste into the local rivers. It is estimated that 250 people died of cancer related

to the toxins between 1987 and 2005.

There have been many more stories, including the highly publicized growth of algae turning lakes

green with the result that water is unfit for drinking. Other examples of contamination include:

� Cadmium: contamination of the Bei River from mining led to suspension of the water

supply downstream.

� Lead: more than 300 children were poisoned following contamination of the village water

supply in Hui county, Guansu province.

� Arsenic: 160 people were poisoned following a leak from a smelting plant in Liaoning province.

And contamination also has impacts on the food chain. But of course contamination is not the

only problem of the water supply. Having water in the first place is also a very important issue, and

the increasing demand for water as living conditions improve and industry booms is confounded by a

growing water shortage. The per capita supply is only 25 per cent of the global average, particularly in

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the south, and 60 million people find it difficult to get water for their daily needs. Riverbeds dry up,

fish die and water quality deteriorates.

How safe is our food?

Food scares are commonplace. In Hong Kong we have had a series of alarms: malachite green in fish

farming; contaminated vegetables; oily fish; Streptococcus suis in pork; and of course H5N1 avian influenza

in our chickens.

The response in Hong Kong has been to create a special government body – the Centre for Food

Safety – with regulatory powers. In Shenzhen, food safety and food security have become important

issues of concern. With the millions of migrant workers living in dormitories, many in cramped and

not too hygienic conditions, the risks of food-borne disease pose a challenge to the local Centre for

Disease Control, which has responsibility for control of outbreaks of food poisoning. A recent incident

of poisoning resulted in two deaths and a number of hospital admissions – the source being an

unlicensed noodle bar.

Issues of food export from China have become highly sensitive – as demonstrated by the recent

debate about whether or not New Year dumplings had been sabotaged.

How safe is our workplace?

The pace of change and urban expansion have led to short cuts in many industrial processes. As the WHO

report says: ‘The trend towards globalization of trade, while economically beneficial, is introducing a host

of occupational hazards to developing countries, where 75 per cent of the global workforce lives and where

the technical and social infrastructure is lacking to protect workers from these hazards.’ In the United States

of America the mission of the Occupational Health and Safety Act is ‘to assure so far as possible every

working man and woman in the nation safe and healthful working conditions’, and is supported by

legislation, but in China, the rapid pace and scale of change make this seem a monolithic struggle.

Occupational hazards can be grouped as:

� Physical (noise, vibration, ionizing or non-ionizing radiation, thermal environment, air

pressure).

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� Chemical (gases and vapours, organic compounds, metals and dusts).

� Biological.

� Ergonomic.

� Psychosocial.

� Safety.

It should be pointed out that occupational accidents may be environmental – due to unsafe

conditions – or personal – due to unsafe acts.

Inevitably, considerations of occupational safety link back to the nature of the working population

and the impact of migration. Employers in, for example, the mining industry, often take short cuts in

their rush to deliver the coal needed for the electricity supply for industry. Coal mining accidents are

not an infrequent occurrence and account for 80 per cent of all accidental deaths. Other occupational

hazards, for the example the high cadmium levels found amongst workers in Huizhou, raise further

concerns about the lack of awareness and adherence to occupational health standards, particularly

amongst the many small village enterprises.

Not only are there issues around physical safety but social equity is a major concern – along with

the responsibility of employers. The migrant workforce is often unskilled, in insecure employment,

living in an unstable community and as part of a marginalized group in society. Its members earn less

than urban residents, although their income will be higher than what they could have expected in the

countryside. While they may be at risk from the environmental factors of their workplace, their health

needs can be complex. Not only do they need to understand safe working practices, there are also

psychological factors affecting them. In a recent study in Shenzhen the most common complaints for

seeking help from a doctor included insomnia and stress-related disorders.

Climate change

It is not only the changing material environment but also its wider impacts that can have health effects.

Extremes of temperature are becoming more common, and last winter was no exception. There have

been numerous press reports of the big freeze across China. In Hong Kong, this resulted in large num-

bers of influenza cases admitted to hospital and worries about the impact of hypothermia on the elderly.

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This cold winter followed on from a hotter-than-average summer in which parts of China also

suffered the impact of heat waves. An added concern is that the impact of heat waves will further

contribute to the already widening health and social inequalities since it is the elderly and poorer

members of society who are most at risk.

The United Nations Development Programme, in its Human Development Report 2007/2008,

expresses particular concern for the developing world as the impacts of climate change increase:

The early warning signs are already visible. Today, we are witnessing at first hand what could be the

onset of major human development reversal in our lifetime. Across developing countries, millions of the

world’s poorest people are already being forced to cope with the impacts of climate change. These impacts do

not register as apocalyptic events in the full glare of world media attention. They go unnoticed in financial

markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product (GDP). But increased exposure to drought,

to more intense storms, to floods and environmental stress is holding back the efforts of the world’s poor to

build a better life for themselves and their children. Climate change will undermine international efforts to

combat poverty…

However – we need not sit passively and say it is all inevitable. As the WHO has highlighted:

‘fortunately, much of the health risk is avoidable through existing health programmes and interventions.

Concerted action to strengthen key features of health systems and to promote health development choices

can enhance public health now as well as reduce vulnerability to future climate change.’

So what are the challenges for the future?

Inevitably in the time available I have been able to do little more than highlight some of the health

aspects of the major environmental risks created by the rapid urbanization of China.

There have been huge advances in China, but the sustainability of progress will rely on a solid

infrastructure which protects the health of the people. I would suggest four As:

� Awareness – develop and sustain awareness of the environmental impacts on health

amongst the public, politicians and key actors.

� Anticipation – targeting on prevention and preparation.

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� Action – at all levels: national, regional, local and individual.

� Advocacy – by those concerned with creating a healthier society.

I would like to finish with a quote from Hu Jintao:

Social development is closely related to the people’s well-being. More importance must therefore be

attached to social development on the basis of economic growth to ensure and improve people’s

livelihood, carry out social restructuring, expand public services, improve social management and

promote social equity and justice. We must do our best to ensure that all our people enjoy their rights

to education, employment, medical and old-age care, and housing, so as to build a harmonious society.

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Professor Sian Griffiths

Professor of Public Health, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Ocean acidification: the other CO2 problemProfessor Nick Owens April 2008

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Everybody has heard of the ice core records – going back 800,000 years – showing repeat patterns

of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and rising global temperatures. Climate change

is a hot topic. But the other CO2 problem – the acidification of the oceans – still goes largely

unrecognized. Neither the scientific literature nor the more popular variety has offered much

coverage of the issue. A quick trawl through Times online throws up more than 5,000 hits for the

words ‘climate change’, but only a dozen for ‘ocean acidification’ (April 2008). This is a totally

unscientific indicator, of course, but it is nonetheless a reasonable measure of what is going on in

terms of our understanding, and indeed basic awareness, of this other big CO2 problem.

Through the natural carbon cycle – which everybody learns about at school – there are continual

fluxes of carbon between the atmosphere and the oceans, and Henry’s Law on the partial pressure of

gases ensures that the relative amounts are maintained in equilibrium. Since the dawn of the Industrial

Revolution, however, we have massively increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere through

our use of fossil fuels, the formation of cement from limestone, and so on. So ocean uptake of CO2

has increased, with a net inward direction of carbon from the atmosphere into the oceans of

approximately 2 billion tonnes of carbon per year. This is roughly a third of all the CO2 produced by

human activities. So ocean uptake has actually slowed the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere, a

process which to some extent is reducing the rapidity of climate change.

But what does it mean for the marine environment?

On entering the ocean, CO2 combines with seawater to produce carbonic acid (H2CO3). This

rapidly dissociates into carbonate ions (CO32-), bicarbonate ions (HCO3-) and hydrogen ions (H+).

That is the very simple first step and it is unequivocal. We know that it happens. And it is the

concentration of hydrogen ions that determines acidity or alkalinity – the more hydrogen ions, the

further down you go on the pH scale from alkaline to acidic. What comes next is a rapid reaction

between the hydrogen ions and carbonate ions present in the seawater. Now the ocean has very large

quantities of carbonate ions from various sources, and the hydrogen ions react with these to produce

another bicarbonate ion; they are effectively mopping up the carbonates. The relative balance of these

forms of inorganic carbon in seawater changes, leaving you with very small quantities of dissolved

carbon dioxide, rather more carbonate, and a very great preponderance of bicarbonate.

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One of the things that is of really great importance to marine organisms – for growing and

maintaining their skeletons or hard structures – is the presence of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which

includes familiar minerals like calcite and aragonite. Carbonate minerals form through the reaction of

calcium ions (Ca2) with carbonate ions (CO32-). Conversely, when the carbonate ions are removed – as

happens when they are ‘mopped up’ by the hydrogen ions – the calcium carbonate essentially dissolves

into its constituent forms.

One important feature of this mineral formation or dissolution process is that the global distribution

of carbonate in the oceans is affected by temperature and pressure. More minerals are present where the

water is warm and shallow, while there is a tendency towards the dissolution of the carbonate in deeper

cooler water where pressure is higher. So surface waters and lower latitudes are higher in carbonate

minerals, and deeper or higher-latitude waters have an undersaturation of the mineral. It is that natural

distribution of carbonates that is being seriously disturbed by the increased ocean uptake of CO2.

On average the pH of the world’s ocean is around 8.1. It varies from place to place, partly due to

the amount of plant life, partly due to temperature and pressure. Now if we assume that we will

continue to burn fossil fuels until they have effectively run out, we will get an ongoing accretion of

atmospheric carbon up to 2250 or thereabouts, and this will then decay only very very slowly. The ocean

will continue to absorb CO2 long after we stop producing it, slowly pushing seawater down the pH scale

and reducing alkalinity by as much 0.7 pH units. Now, 0.7 may not sound like very much, but when

you consider that pH is a logarithmic scale, it is a very significant number. In fact we have already shifted

the pH of the ocean, reducing it by 0.1 of a pH unit since preindustrial times in the surface waters, and

we are beginning to see penetration down into deeper water as well. Now 0.1 of a pH unit may seem a

very trivial amount, but it represents a 30 per cent increase in the quantity of hydrogen ions in the ocean

– already. Should we continue to burn fossil fuels at the present rate we will see levels of hydrogen ions

right down through the ocean water column that have not been seen for at least 55 million years and

possibly longer. This is a very significant and major perturbation to the Earth’s system.

Unlike climate change predictions, of which there are many and they are uncertain, the chemistry and

physics involved in ocean acidification is very simple and very certain. One of the uncertainties about

climate, for example, is how clouds operate, or perhaps the way that ice shifts and moves. These are

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complicated dynamic systems that are very difficult to predict. But what we are talking about here is

straightforward unequivocal ocean chemistry and the simple physics of pumping CO2 into the ocean. Of

course we cannot be certain how high the concentrations of atmospheric carbon will go before they begin

to flatten out. We might even manage to keep them at 500 parts per million, but even that, in 100 years

or so, will inevitably take us to an ocean pH that the world has not seen for 25 million years. Some people

have suggested that we are heading for an ocean pH that hasn’t been seen for 300 million years.

Back to the minerals now, because this is where we are starting to have the interaction with the biology.

Measurements and predictions of aragonite saturation levels show an alarming picture: during the pre-

industrial period, the majority of the ocean’s surface waters, stretching from (very roughly) around 40º

North to 40º South, were classed as adequate to optimal for the existence of calcifiers. In the 1990s, this

band stretched, perhaps, from only 30º North to 30º South, though it was still a substantial part of the

ocean. By mid-century, however, only small pockets of adequate saturation are expected to remain, with

the vast majority of the ocean ranging from ‘marginal’ to ‘low’, and by the dawn of the next century, there

will remain only small areas of marginal saturation, with most of it ‘extremely low’.

So what does all this mean for the ocean and the organisms that live in it? There is a whole range of

organisms that use calcium carbonate minerals to make their hard structures, the most obvious among

them being the reef-building corals. It is no coincidence that corals are particularly abundant in warm,

shallow waters where the mineral aragonite is very abundant. They cover around 1.28 million square

kilometres, which is less than 1.2 per cent of the world continental shelf area, but are highly biologically

diverse, harbouring some 25 per cent of known marine species. Corals are fairly easy to experiment on,

and we know that they cannot secrete stable forms of calcium carbonate (especially aragonite) at a low

pH. So we are getting a very marked reduction in the rate of coral skeleton formation – of around 20

per cent, rising to 40 per cent over the coming decades, as a result of what we have experienced already

in terms of reduction of pH. At one level, of course, no one would wish to see the reduction of corals

just for their own sake. But they are also enormously important around the world. Recent data from the

World Bank estimate that over half a billion people fundamentally rely on healthy corals for food and

other goods and services, with an estimated value of $375 billion. Corals also provide natural sea

defences for low-lying islands, usually rather poor islands at that, so there are massive socio-economic

consequences associated with coral destruction.

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There are also some very extensive cold corals that tend to be in deep water. They have only been

discovered relatively recently and they have been very little studied compared with their warm water

cousins. But they are clearly very abundant, with new colonies being discovered all the time. They are

found everywhere in deep cold water and are particularly important off the coast of the United

Kingdom. They can form very large structures of as much as 20 metres in depth and 100 metres across,

and some are perhaps 8,000 years old, and are havens for biodiversity, harbouring extensive fish stocks

which use them as feeding grounds and for shelter. Now bearing in mind that these deeper cold-water

environments are already low in minerals, then the introduction of CO2 and the lowering of pH will

reduce those levels even further, thus putting deep-water corals under extreme pressure. The depth

below which mineral desaturation occurs – where there are insufficient minerals for marine calcifiers to

thrive – is know as the ‘saturation horizon’, and shallowing of the aragonite saturation horizon will be

greatest in the higher latitudes, making these ecosystems very vulnerable.

Molluscs, of course, require calcium carbonate in mineral form to make their shells, and a whole range

of responses to changing pH has been observed in experiments with these organisms done at Plymouth. A

lowering of the pH to 7.3 results in a 50 per cent reduction in growth, and at a pH of only 7.0 (ie neutral),

scallop mortality was found to be at 100 per cent. Juveniles and spat (larvae) tend to be particularly

sensitive. So there are some very real concerns about the natural communities of molluscs, but also again

about the economic consequences for commercial shell fisheries. Echinoderms such as sea urchins, sea stars

and sea slugs are particularly sensitive to lowering pH because they have no impermeable barrier between

the ambient seawater and their internal body cavity, so have little ability to control the acid-base chemistry

within their bodies. The heart urchin (Echinocardium cordatum), when exposed to reductions in pH,

showed considerable deterioration of the digestive tract, affecting nutrient uptake, growth and, ultimately,

reproduction. Again, echinoderms are very important for the ecosystem, providing services in terms of

turning over material in sediments and so on, and as food for fish species. Many of them are commercially

important too, both in themselves and in supporting active fisheries.

There are also some quite quirky things happening here. Take the edible periwinkle (Littorina

littorea), and its survival mechanisms when threatened by the green shore crab (Carcinus maenas). We

have known for some time that there is considerable communication between these two organisms in

the form of chemical cues being picked up by the periwinkles. When they detect the presence of crabs,


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they lay down much thicker shells. In a future ocean where the availability of carbonate ions is reduced,

snails may be less able to thicken their shells and could therefore be more vulnerable to predation.

There are likely to be all sorts of unexpected consequences for the ecology of these sorts of

organisms, particularly in the smaller plankton species, and there is currently very little idea of the

subtleties that may occur. But what experiments have been done show that these organisms are very

sensitive. There is evidence to indicate that one might expect reduced reproductive rates in

undersaturated waters, and that marine zooplankton passing through plumes of CO2-enriched seawater

suffer high mortalities.

There is also some debate on the relative importance of some of these organisms. Take, for example,

Limacina helicina, a shelled pteropod found in polar and subpolar waters of both the northern and

southern hemispheres. They are basically little winged snails that float and flap around in the plankton,

and are believed by some to be a very important component of the food chain. There have been

instances where these things have shown up in vast quantities in sediment traps, and there are areas of

the world ocean where the sediment is made up primarily of the remains of these organisms, so it is

almost certain that they have an important role to play. And it is also certain that they need high levels

of aragonite saturation to make their shells. But current scenarios for ocean acidification indicate that

by 2050 there will be few areas where these pteropods can survive, and by the end of this century almost

all the ocean – and particularly polar waters – will be so undersaturated that the pteropod shells will

simply dissolve.

So what will these pteropods do? There is a possibility that they will just move: they are planktonic

after all. But there are quite potent and marked frontal boundaries which isolate the Southern Ocean,

so planktonic movement seems unlikely. There are some indications that, given time, some organisms

could adapt through genetic selection and adjust to the lowering pH. The concern, however, is the speed

at which acidification is happening, almost certainly precluding sufficiently rapid evolutionary change.

One kind of organism that has been under study is coccolithophores. These are in fact a plant – they

photosynthesize – and are quite beautiful under the microscope, like little footballs with round plates

like dinner plates – actually shells make of calcium carbonate. And so of course they need these minerals

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in saturating quantities. Not only are they beautiful; they are important components of the ecosystem

and are believed to have been so over geological time scales. Their story is quite fascinating. They are

miniscule – about 2 microns (millionths of a metre) in diameter – but occur in such vast quantities that

you can actually see coccolithophore blooms from space, appearing as milky white swathes hugging the

land masses, particularly around Europe and northeast America, the South Pacific and the Southern

Ocean. Their numbers are absolutely unimaginable. So you have got this tiny little thing in such

quantities that it can be seen from space. And they have been produced in these enormous quantities

over such long geological time periods that where they sediment out, all their chalky plates have

combined to form features such as the White Cliffs of Dover. This is quite a challenge to one’s thinking

about scale – to have something 2 microns in diameter that can be seen from hundreds of kilometres

off in space and that has produced solid rock many metres thick.

Another interesting feature is that as the coccolithophores die they release a volatile sulphur

compound which eventually gets out into the atmosphere as dimethyl sulphide (DMS). Now one of the

interesting things about DMS is that once in the atmosphere it oxidizes to sulphur dioxide (SO2) aerosol

particles, around which clouds form. So it is possible that coccolithophores are a natural temperature

regulator that may have played an important role in this way over geological time scales. Their very

presence in the ocean also results in a lowering of the sea temperature, as their high reflectivity reflects

sunlight back out to space (which, of course, is what makes them visible from so far away). If you

measure seawater temperatures within these blooms of coccolithophores you find the water temperature

is cooler than outside them, so you have a double cooling effect from these creatures.

There has been some pretty good evidence of what happens when you expose carbonate-dependent

organisms to a lowering of seawater pH associated with the sorts of atmospheric CO2 concentrations

that we are almost certainly committed to. And it seems pretty convincing. Or at least it did – until the

appearance of an article in Science in April 2008 that has rather turned this simple notion on its head.

It has not totally discredited theories about the negative impacts on marine life of ocean acidification,

but it does mean that things are more complicated than we thought. The paper in Science, by Iglesias-

Rodriguez and others, explored the findings of an investigation into the effects of CO2 on the

coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi in its formation of calcite plates. Contrary to expectations,

they found that raising CO2 and lowering pH actually led to the plates getting bigger and thicker.


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Production of the mineral was in fact stimulated by an increase in CO2. So it is thought that certain

types of coccolithophores might actually do quite well in a high-CO2 environment. This is clearly more

complicated than we at first thought and, like all good papers, the final paragraph said ‘we need more

research’. It is an interesting tale that is developing all the time.

One of the features of changing pH relates to the availability of key nutrients for phytoplankton and

bacterial growth. There are many ionic compounds in seawater that have different forms depending

upon the pH. Different forms of nitrogen, in particular the ions ammonia and ammonium, for

example, change their quantities and proportions depending on pH. Different inorganic phosphate ions

also shift their balance as pH falls. Changes in the relative proportions of these nutrients may well have

an effect on plankton diversity. Colleagues in Plymouth have modelled what might happen in the North

Sea if we assume ‘business as usual’ in the burning of fossil fuels, with atmospheric CO2 concentrations

moving from the current level of around 380 parts per million (ppm) to 700ppm or beyond. Their work

suggests that by 2050 some areas of the North Sea will have a different pH range from today’s, and by

2100 most of the region will have undergone a drop on the pH scale of 0.3 units or more. This will lead

to a change in the ratio of nitrate to total nitrogen (raising the nitrate), with potential effects on

denitrification and eutrophication, and as yet under-researched physiological impacts on fauna.

Looking at the fossil record going back 600 million years, the planet has experienced very high CO2

concentrations during interglacial periods, while through times of glaciation the CO2 has been low, if

with some temporary hotspots. During the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, there was a big spike

of CO2 into the atmosphere, a corresponding increase in global temperature, and almost certainly a very

rapid acidification event in the ocean, much as we are experiencing today. The CO2 probably spiked as

a result of a release of methane from the thermafrost, rapidly oxidizing into CO2. And much of that

carbon was absorbed into the ocean.

Of course there is a massive amount of carbon stored in the ocean, far more than in the atmosphere

or biosphere, and over long time scales this has formed carbonate sediments that have acted as a buffer

to fluctuating seawater acidity. But where you have a very rapid increase in CO2 uptake, the ocean

cannot absorb it and so you get a big slide down the pH scale. The amount of CO2 entering the ocean

in the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum was so rapid that the ocean was incapable of buffering it.

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Sediment cores taken from the Weddell Sea from that period show a marked change in the colour of

the sediment resulting from a fundamental and profound shift in the composition of the organisms in

the oceans. It is estimated that something over 50 per cent of the calcifying organisms in the ocean at

the time became extinct. This is very graphic evidence of what happens when you have a rapid shift in

the acidity of the ocean, and it is rather chilling to think that as far as we are aware, the rate of change

in the acidity of the ocean today as a result of human activity is faster than occurred during the the

Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. There is no doubt whatsoever that there was a major extinction

in the oceans at that time and this is part of the concern today.

I thought I would finish by asking whether the ocean could come to our aid. As we know the ocean

is soaking up CO2 through natural processes. Roughly half of the carbon that has been mobilized by

humans since the industrial revolution has ended up in the ocean. Could the ocean be manipulated

further to help solve the problems we have caused – not only the acidity problem but also the climate

change problem?

There are very large areas of the world ocean which, on the face of it, should have greater quantities

of plant life than they currently do, with plenty of nitrogen and phosphorous and so on. These are called

high-nitrogen low-chlorophyll areas, and they occur in different parts of the world. The Southern Ocean

certainly has a big one, the equatorial Pacific another. It has been suggested that if you fertilize these

areas of the ocean with iron you can stimulate the plant life and thereby get a greater CO2 uptake from

the atmosphere. Experiments with iron fertilization in the Southern Ocean have indeed achieved

phytoplankton blooms large enough to be observed from space. So people have begun to think very

seriously about fertilizing the ocean. But there are many problems with potentially serious

consequences. First, to have any real impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, you would have to do

it on a vast scale – the size of the entire ocean, not just a patch of it. The time scales involved are vast,

bearing in mind that the carbon we are burning in the form of fossil fuels was laid down in part by these

kinds of plankton blooms over millions of years, not just a few hundreds. They happened over geological

time, and it would be impossible to stimulate the system to soak up that quantity of carbon over the

sort of time scales that we require. We also know that plankton blooms give off compounds like

methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse molecules in their own right. Thus we would

be up against a major perturbation of the natural system with some very serious consequences.

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Unfortunately, there are several companies who are lured by the carbon trading notion and are planning

on doing this sort of thing right now. Personally, I think this is utterly insane – and you don’t often get

scientists being as bold as that.

Closer to the realms of the possible, perhaps, is scrubbing out the CO2, pressurizing it and turning

it into liquid, and piping it to the deeper parts of the ocean. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has done

some experiments with putting liquefied CO2 into the ocean, where it basically just rolls around on the

seabed. Now this is a good way of ‘burying’ carbon dioxide, but only temporarily. It will eventually

dissolve into the seawater, making it more acid. A more realistic possibility is the near-permanent burial

of CO2 in the rock formations from which oil and gas have been extracted. This is so-called geological

sequestration. CO2 is captured at source, compressed and injected back down into the rock strata. There

are some experimental sites where this is already going on, including at an oil field in Norway. The

United Kingdom, too, is considering this as a serious option. An assessment of the types of rock

formation suited to this type of carbon storage concludes that there are plenty of appropriate sites

around the world, including opportunities in the North Sea.

There are, however, many issues yet to be addressed, not least leakage and whether this might give rise

to a serious acid event in the locality of the carbon storage site. Modelling work that has been done on this

suggests considerably different responses at different times of the year. If you get a release in the early part

of the year before the ocean has had a chance to stratify, you might get slight acidification but it would be

short-lived and much of the carbon would go straight out into the atmosphere. If, however, you get a leak

later on in the year when the ocean is firmly stratified, you would get quite significant acidification in that

region of the ocean. So there are some serious decisions to be made if we go down this route.

As mentioned earlier, not much has been written on ocean acidification relative to the mass of

literature on climate change. But there are a couple of good sources of information: the Royal Society

produced a report on the topic a couple of years ago (Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric

carbon dioxide, available on the web, http://royalsociety.org) with very easily accessible information and

some good references to primary sources. There are also some interesting websites, including the Ocean

Acidification Network, a very serious and highly erudite site run by the UNESCO Intergovernmental

Oceanographic Commission and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research.

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I am sure we all have our own personal views on whether concerns about ocean acidification are

simply another distraction. But there is no doubt that by burning fossil fuels we have reduced the ocean’s

surface alkalinity, and the longer we go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the longer this process

will continue and the deeper it will go. The chemistry behind it is unequivocal, even if the biological

responses are complex and largely unknown. Alongside climate change, this is a very strong argument

indeed for curbing our emissions, not just mopping up after ourselves.


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Professor Nick Owens

Director, British Antarctic Survey

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International environmental governance Professor Robert T. Watson May 2008

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There are international conventions for stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity and

desertification. There are no conventions for air quality, water or forestry, though we do have a good

deal of regional or national legislation on each of these. The problem is that with a number of different

conventions and legislative structures covering the various environmental themes, we tend to think

through the policies for one while neglecting the implications for another, so there is some degree of

dysfunctionality in the way we approach the policy process at both national and international levels.

Whether in the United Kingdom, within Europe or in developing countries, one department looks at

climate change, another at biodiversity, a different one at forestry, and yet another at water.

We have to recognize that we have multiple environmental issues to deal with, of which climate

change is but one, though it is the one that the world is focused on at present. As climate begins to

change, it will have an effect on the radiation budget of the atmosphere and the stratosphere, which in

turn has an affect on stratospheric ozone, and stratospheric ozone in turn has an affect on the Earth’s

climate, particularly in the polar regions. Equally, a changing climate has an effect on biodiversity and

ecosystems, and as we change our ecosystems we modify the exchange of energy and chemicals between

the atmosphere, the ocean and the land, so that it feeds back again on the climate system. There is no

question that climate change has a significant effect on forests and in turn these affect the climate.

Climate change clearly affects water, land albedo and desertification, and it has an impact on air quality.

In other words, we cannot look at climate change in isolation from these other environmental issues,

which are also issues of development and national security.

The tendency to isolation is also one of the fundamental problems of assessment. Until recently,

even the scientists tended to look at each of these issues separately rather than at the links between them.

But if we do not look at them in a much more holistic way we will probably not have the informed

policies that we need. We can miss out the synergies and, even worse, there could be trade-offs that

we don’t understand – policies that will be good for climate change may well be bad for biodiversity,

for example.

Not all the areas of environmental concern actually have an international assessment process. To

look at three: stratospheric ozone, climate change and biodiversity all have conventions and protocols.

There is an assessment process embedded within stratospheric ozone, and we have one that is linked to


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but not embedded in the climate change process (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –

IPCC), but there is no assessment process linked with biodiversity. Instead it has a number of rather

poor ad hoc processes.

Science in policy making

While science can only ever be one of the many necessary inputs to decision making, comprehensive

scientific programmes at the national and international level are absolutely essential to inform public

policy. We have some pretty strong programmes in general for the natural sciences: climate change,

biodiversity, or stratospheric ozone depletion. But we have underinvested in the social sciences – the

behavioural issues linked to the environment. Too many people think we can solve the climate issue

through technology combined with policy. But if we don’t understand people, individual and community

behaviour, the private sector and governments – and how they make their decisions – we will miss out.

Technology is crucial, but so are the behavioural issues.

We have good international coordination of some of the international programmes that relate to

biodiversity, climate change and ecosystems, such as the World Climate Research Programme, the

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the international human DIVERSITAS programme

addressing biodiversity, though the latter – which is indeed a social science programme – is pretty weak.

A further weakness is that we have inadequate private- and public-sector funding. Provided that there

is open, transparent, independent peer review of the research – whether funded in a collaborative way

between the public and private sectors or just by the private sector – we really should be promoting far

more public-private partnerships. And then it is absolutely crucial to bring everything together – the

scientific, the technical and the economic – through the best experts from all stakeholder groups:

universities, government laboratories, the private sector and the NGOs. Indigenous and local knowledge

also needs to be integrated with modern scientific knowledge, though here the difficulty is that little of

it is written down, and what is written down is not peer reviewed.

One of the big challenges is how to bring together the various types of research. Of course effective

communication is absolutely crucial, though this is something that we tend to be rather bad at. Most

scientists talk in jargon, so for politicians and the media in general we are pretty incomprehensible.

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What is an assessment?

An assessment is more than a review. It is a critical evaluation, an expert judgement of what constitutes

robust knowledge and of what is uncertain. Its aim is to reduce complexity, especially for ministers, and to

add value. And if it is to have an impact it must be demand-driven, not supply-driven. The users of the

assessment have an important role in defining its scope, alongside, of course, the academic community.

So what are some of the critical features of an assessment? Assessments must be open, transparent and

representative, and they have to be legitimate with respect to all the stakeholders you are trying to

influence. The process is as important as the results: if you get it wrong, you won’t have stakeholder

confidence and the results won’t be used. Success requires a very bureaucratic approach, with well-defined

principles and procedures about how the peer review will be done and by whom, and how the resulting

documents will be accepted and approved. The review is an essential part of the process – without it,

research and assessments are worthless – and it is not unusual to have an assessment reviewed twice. This

is a huge amount of work involving governments, the academic community and the public sector.

Whether you want to influence governments, the private sector or civil society, they must be involved

in helping to define what they want to assess. With regard to maximizing the potential for influence, I

would argue (even though many academics would disagree) that assessments should be policy relevant

but not policy prescriptive. They should not be normative and should not make recommendations. The

private sector and governments tend not to listen if you tell them what to do, so options for action are

far more powerful than recommendations. The ‘if... then...’ approach generally has the greatest success,

and of course it must be evidence based.

It is interesting trying to differentiate the evidence from the ideological positions of some of the

authors involved in assessments. Different authors present different views, and every view needs to be

taken into account, even if it is supported by only 10 per cent of the literature. So it is important that

policy makers understand what is robust and what is not, while bearing in mind that the less robust views

have to be understood and taken into account.

The best experts in the world need to be balanced across the disciplines – bringing together natural

sciences with social sciences and technologies, and if the issue is an international or a global one there


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must be expertise from both developed and developing countries. It is absolutely crucial that the experts

are there in their individual capacity, not representing their government, the private sector or an NGO.

Assessments should be holistic in scope. They should cover risk assessment and clearly define and

separate it from risk management: the key issue is to communicate the risk in terms of probabilities. We

are fairly good at identifying where the uncertainties lie – an essential element of any assessment – but

the implications for policy formulation (or risk management) are much trickier to pin down. I have

already said we need to use both traditional and institutional knowledge, which must come into play on

the local and global scale as appropriate. For many climate change issues, for example, you can take a

global perspective to bring together information leading to a mitigation strategy. But when it comes to

water resource management or biological diversity, then it has to be a very local perspective – at least at

a watershed or regional level – and communications with local stakeholders are absolutely crucial.

Key characteristics

An assessment must be multi-thematic, bringing together the environment, technological, social and

economic perspectives. It must be multi-spacial, using a consistent framework from the local to the

global. It must be multi-temporal, examining what we can learn from the past and identifying a likely or

plausible future. There should be multiple sponsors and maximized stakeholder involvement. Indigenous

and institutional knowledge need to be integrated, and scientific knowledge, technologies, institutions

and policies must all come under scrutiny.

What sort of assessments have we done? The International Ozone Assessments began in 1981 and have

continued until the present. They have been intergovernmental, with governments approving their broad

scope, and have undergone expert peer review (with no governmental involvement). These have been

unbelievably influential on both national and international policy formulation, and also with respect to the

private sector. Understanding the links between what we were doing, putting chlorine and bromine into

the atmosphere, and the ultimate effect of an increase in skin cancer, captured the attention of the public

and the policy makers alike. I shall return to the ozone assessments later.

The IPCC started in 1988 and is on-going. The chairmanship of Burt Bolin really set up the IPCC in

the right way. It started off very simply: our first working group on the science of climate change involved

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only about 40 people, whereas more recent working groups probably brought about 300 people to the

table. But it has always been intergovernmental, with governments approving the scope of each of the

working groups. There are three working groups – one on the science of the climate system, one on impacts

and adaptation, and one on economics and technological issues. There is also a synthesis report that

integrates the knowledge of the three. This worked very well in the Third Assessment Report (I am biased

about this one because I chaired it). Unfortunately the Fourth Assessment Report involved far less integration

of the three groups, not because of the scientists but because the governments – largely led by the United

States of America and China – did not want a full synthesis.

The IPCC has had excellent expert government and peer review of the summaries for policy makers,

a process that typically takes four, five or six days, and results in an approved 20-page summary (boiled

down from around a thousand pages). Many in the academic community think it inappropriate to

involve governments in approval of a document written by experts, but I would argue vehemently that

this is part of the process. Only when governments read and approve these documents on a word-by-word

basis will they begin to inform policy. Simultaneously, of course, the scientists maintain ownership

because, while the document may undergo changes, the academics are there to ensure that there is no

distortion. The IPCC has undoubtedly been influential on the policy process, albeit limited in the United

States, though here, too, it is starting to penetrate. Some of the big multinationals are using it, as are some

individual states such as California and New York. The religious right, amazingly, is also starting to use

it, arguing that climate change is a serious moral and ethical issue.

The Global Biodiversity Assessment was a brilliant non-governmental expert review document, but

it was totally supply driven. Realizing that the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) had no

international assessment process, a bunch of us simply got together and did one – a thousand pages with

over a thousand contributing scientists. It was a superb academic document, but because the governments

did not ask for it and it had no appropriate mandate in the convention, it had almost no impact on policy.

It was a valuable lesson: do not do supply-driven assessments; make sure that there is a need and that the

user community has asked for one.

So when we did the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment a few years later, it was non-governmental but

tied to the intergovernmental process (e.g. CBD; United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification


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– UNCCD; Ramsar Convention on Wetlands). It underwent both expert and informal governmental

review, and there was a broad range of stakeholders on the board of directors, including users and scientists.

It was also multi-scale, from local to global. But there were relatively few governments involved, which was

its biggest weakness, and it has taken a number of years to catch on. It is, however, beginning to have an

impact. The UK government, for instance, has started to put together a policy arguing that the country

should take an ecosystem approach both in the management of natural ecosystems and with regard to the

implications of infrastructure such as roads. Its main weakness is that it was non-governmental.

Our latest major assessment is the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology

for Development. This was intergovernmental but with a multi-stakeholder bureau. The bureau was

made up of 60 people, 30 governments, 30 members of civil society, six from the private sector, six

NGOs, six producer groups, four consumer groups, and eight international organizations dealing with

agriculture. It was sponsored by seven international agencies (World Bank, Food and Agriculture

Organization, United Nations Environment Programme, United Nations Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization, United Nations Development Programme, World Health Organization and

Global Environment Facility) and had reasonably significant amounts of money from governments and

a little from the private sector. It underwent three expert and government reviews. The plenary approved

the scope as well as the summaries for decision makers and the synthesis report. It was multi-thematic,

multi-temporal and multi-scale, including a global and five sub-global assessments.

Did it work? It was an incredible social experiment, with a bureau that effectively went all the way

from the private sector through to the NGOs and covered some contentious issues – transgenics and

trade, for example. These are far more contentious than anything we had touched upon in the IPCC or

Millennium Ecosystem Assessments. There were people in the room that would not usually even begin

to talk to each other: Pesticide Action Network, Greenpeace, Monsanto... So it was an incredible

experience and I shall detail some of the results later on.

Assessment governance structures

So what are the pros and cons of different governance structures? The pro for the non-governmental one

is that it is typically driven by scientists, but this carries the downside of little buy-in by the other

stakeholders. The Global Biodiversity Assessment is a perfect example of that. The Millennium

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Ecosystem Assessment made greater effort to involve all users, but it still lacked true government buy-in.

The intergovernmental approach, such as the IPCC, gets good buy-in from governments – even though

some still walk away, as the United States did from this one – but can have a more limited impact with

other stakeholders. The hybrid – the agricultural assessment – has everybody on board but is a real

challenge given the range of views. Nonetheless I would always argue for the hybrid. The transaction costs

are huge but at least it brings everybody to the table, even if they then walk away: the private sector turned

its back on the agricultural assessment three months before its finish because we were not saying very

positive things about pesticides or transgenics.

In the last two years there have been seven major international assessments: the Millennium Ecosystem

Assessment; the 2006 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion; the Consultative Group on International

Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management; the IPCC Fourth

Assessment Report, the fourth Global Environment Outlook; the Assessment of Agricultural Science and

Technology; and the upcoming Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s

Environmental Outlook 2008.

In the next six months some 40 people will be coming together to do a synthesis of all these global

assessments. I think they are basically saying the same thing, and that what is now needed is to focus on

policy implications that cut across all the different conventions and international organizations. So our

synthesis is to spend only five or 10 pages on the scientific interlinkages, and 20 to 30 on the policy

implications, what types of policies will have positive synergies across the various issues, and where there

are significant trade-offs.

Assessment findings

Of course the most successful assessments are driven by scientific research, and an assessment is only as

good as the knowledge base in the literature. Assessments do not try to add new knowledge. Rather they

synthesize existing knowledge.

Stratospheric ozone

In the 1970s we had a theory that chlorine and bromine destroyed stratospheric ozone, but there were no

observations to prove it, let alone link cause and effect. We effectively began to do ozone assessments in


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1981, but it was a few years before data on the Antarctic ozone hole, gathered at the Halley Bay research

station by Joe Farman and the British Antarctic Survey, revealed the extent of the problem. In 1987 we got

the Montreal Protocol, which put a freeze on the growth trend of the long-lived CFCs (11, 12, 113, 114

and 115) and imposed a 50 per cent cut on the industrialized countries but no obligations on developing

countries. Our 1989 assessment explained how human activities – putting chlorine and bromine in the

stratosphere – were destroying stratospheric ozone, leading to the London Amendments (1990) for the

gradual phase-out of CFCs. Then we realized that we could actually see downward seasonal ozone trends.

The mistake we had been making was to take all the ground-based observational data from the Dobson

stations and look for an annual global average, so we had failed to notice that ozone thinning was a

function of latitude and season – exactly what the theory said it should be. An assessment of these findings

quickly led to the Copenhagen Amendment (1992) for faster phase-out. We then actually started to see

increases in ultraviolet radiation at ground level, findings that came out in our 1994 assessment, and led

to the Vienna Adjustment which put caps on other ozone-depleting substances. We also at that time started

to see that ozone losses are as significant in the Arctic as in the Antarctic. By the time of our 1998

assessment, we were able to report a detectable reduction of ozone-depleting chemicals in the lower

atmosphere. This one led to the Beijing Amendment, with new controls and trade limits. By 2002 we were

able to assess the time period involved in ozone recovery.

This was fundamentally excellent research brought together in a series of international assessments,

each one leading to new regulations, such that all long-lived CFCs and bromofluorocarbons have been

banned, as have most short-lived compounds. There can be a superb linkage between good academic

science, international assessment, international agreement and effective policy for change. Obviously we

can never be absolutely sure what would have been the effect of stratospheric chlorine without the Vienna

Convention, the Montreal Protocol and its amendments, but it would have been going off the scale

during the next couple of decades. Each amendment has done a little more to bring down the levels of

these compounds in the atmosphere, and the most recent – the Beijing Amendment – aims for total

recovery of the ozone layer. All the ozone-destroying compounds have either peaked or are close enough

to peaking for the ozone layer largely to have recovered in around 50 years time.

This process raises an interesting question about how much evidence you need before you take action.

It was in 1974 that Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina postulated that chlorine and bromine would

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destroy stratospheric ozone. It took 10 years to get a convention and two more to get a protocol, with

effective amendments following on. But with long-lived substances like these halocarbons, it meant that

enough chlorine and bromine had built up in the stratosphere for it to take decades to return to normal,

even after a 100 per cent ban on emissions. So in one way the ozone story is a phenomenal success story.

In other ways you could argue that we waited too long.

Climate change and ecosystems

Climate change and ecosystem degradation are highly integrated issues. They are environmental and

developmental issues of course: both undermine environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation and the

livelihoods of the poor. They cause significant problems for human health and threaten security at the

personal, national and regional level. Climate change and ecosystem degradation put further stress on a

highly stressed world. We have recently seen how fragile even a country which is relatively stable, such as

Kenya, can be. Ecosystem degradation and climate change can push a country or a region that is on the

borders of conflict into conflict. These are issues of both inter- and intra-generational equity. Developing

countries and the poor are the most vulnerable, but with both climate change and ecosystem degradation

it is largely the actions of the industrialized world that have caused the problem, and clearly the actions

of today will affect future generations.

Climate change

We know that climate change is happening and there is absolutely no doubt that it is due to human

activity. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 30 to 35 per cent. We are already seeing warmer

temperatures and future warming is inevitable. We are seeing changing precipitation patterns both

spacially and temporally. Some areas are becoming wetter; some are becoming drier. In most cases we are

seeing more heavy precipitation. We are seeing higher sea levels, retreating mountain glaciers, melting of

the Greenland ice cap, and reduced Arctic sea ice in both extent and thickness. We are seeing more

frequent extreme weather events (heat waves, floods, droughts), and we are seeing more intense (rather

than more frequent) cyclonic events such as the hurricanes in the Atlantic.

The big debate has surrounded whether these changes are due to natural phenomena or to human

activity. When we plot observed temperatures against simulations of what might have been expected due

to natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanic activity, we find that observed increases


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simply don’t fit the simulations – whether as a global mean, over land or over sea, and over each of the

continents. When, however, we simulate the changes you might expect with the added influence of

anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the simulation matches observed temperature change. It was this type

of information that led the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report to say with more than 90 per cent

certainty that most of the observed temperature change in the last 50 years has been due to human

activity: an increase in greenhouse gases largely resulting from combustion practices and deforestation.

The crucial issue is what will happen in the future. Relative to 1990, one predicts a rise of anything from

a low of 1.1ºC to a high of 6.4ºC, with land areas warming more than the oceans, and high latitudes

warming more than the tropics. So to what degree should one adopt a precautionary approach with this

type of information?

We project future changes based on plausible assumptions of demographic, economic,

technological, socio-political, and indeed behavioural change. Probabilistic scenarios are not easy to do

but, given a range of scenarios, it is reasonable to take the average as a best estimate. On that basis,

what we expect doesn’t look good – it would suggest something like a 3ºC change over the next 100

years. We all know that the summer of 2003 was hot, with some 20,000 to 30,000 people in Europe

dying in the heat wave – typically old people who could not get out of the high temperatures at night

(it was a night-time phenomenon). There was a similar experience in the United States more than a

decade ago when 600 people died. This was a socio-economic issue, particularly affecting poor people

and the elderly who did not have air conditioning. As with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, it is

always the poor and disadvantaged that suffer most from these types of events. But based on the

projections, the summer temperatures of 2003 will seem like a very average summer in the 2040s and

a cool one by the 2060s.

Plenty of people living in the United Kingdom might welcome warmer temperatures. With respect

to agriculture, there might be opportunities for an extended growing season. High latitudes in the

northern hemisphere are likely to experience increased productivity, at least with a rise of 2 or 3ºC. But

beyond that, we would project falls in yields in many developed regions. Of course this assumes that

there will be no significant breakthrough in developing drought-resistant, temperature-tolerant, salinity-

resistant and pest-resistant plants – all of which might be feasible, but can we do it with conventional

plant breeding or will we need transgenics? Will transgenics live up to their promise? Even if they do

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make the breakthrough, will the public accept them in light of environmental and human health

considerations? These are real issues, so our projections make no assumptions about developing crops to

be more climate resilient.

A moderate rise in temperatures may have some advantages for the developed world, but in many

developing countries temperatures are already beyond what is required for maximum yield for most

cereals, so even a slight warming will result in decreased productivity. With regard to water, we are already

seeing glaciers melting all over the world – a serious environmental issue but an equally serious

developmental one, as hundreds of millions of people depend on run-off from glaciers. We will see

significant decreases in water in the southern Mediterranean, the northern and southern parts of Africa

and in many parts of Asia. Sea-level rise will have adverse effects in low-lying delta areas, and obviously

in the small island states.

Ecosystems

The five major threats to biological diversity and ecosystem function are climate change, habitat change,

invasive species, overexploitation and pollution, especially by nitrogen and phosphorus. The Millennium

Ecosystem Assessment looked at a number of ecological systems including forestry, drylands and the

marine environment, and assessed to what extent the five main threat factors have been drivers of

biodiversity loss over the last 100 years. The results were varied. Boreal forest diversity, for example, has

suffered little from habitat alteration, whereas this has been a major driver of loss in tropical forests and

temperate grasslands. Climate change, as you might expect, has not been a significant threat in the last

hundred years to most ecological systems (with the exception of the polar regions). But the future tells a

very different story. In only one ecosystem type (temperate forests) is one of these threats decreasing

(habitat alteration). In all other ecosystems, the five major threats have an ongoing, increasing or rapidly

increasing impact, with climate change and pollution the most rapidly growing threats across all

ecosystems. If we don’t get to grips with climate change or pollution, these will be the major drivers of

change over the next century.

Why do we care? Ecosystem health has major consequences for human well-being, and it was this –

the link between ecosystem health and human well-being – that provided the conceptual framework for

the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. We separated ecosystem services into four blocks:


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� Provisioning: food, fresh water, wood and fibre, fuel etc.

� Regulating: of climate, flood, disease and water purification.

� Cultural: aesthetic, spiritual, educational and recreational.

� And supporting the above: nutrient cycling, soil formation, primary production etc.

And we looked at the five major constituents of human well-being, as follows:

� Security: personal safety, access to resources, security from disasters.

� Basic material requirements: adequate livelihoods, sufficient nutritious food, shelter, access to

goods.

� Health: strength, feeling well, access to clean air and water.

� Good social relations: social cohesion, mutual respect, ability to help others.

� And relevant to all of the above: freedom of choice and action.

Of course we have insufficient knowledge to measure these links in a strictly quantitative sense, but the

framework enabled us to see where certain ecosystem services have been maximized at the expense of

others. We realized, for example, that human development has mainly focused on maximizing the

provisioning services – food, water and fuel – and that this has been undermining the regulating, cultural

and supporting services, which in turn has undermined many of the constituents of human well-being.

It is this type of analysis that – even without strict quantification – is slowly but surely influencing policy

formulation in some countries.

How do we move to sustainable ecosystems? We have to put a value on them, and therefore we need

to change the economic background to decision making. We need to make sure that we understand the

value of ecosystem services that sell in the market place – the provisioning services – and those that

traditionally have no market value – the regulating and cultural services. We need to remove subsidies

to agriculture, fisheries and energy that cause harm to people and the environment. We need to

introduce payments to landowners in return for managing their lands in ways that protect ecosystem

services, such as water quality and carbon storage. We need to establish market mechanisms to reduce

nutrient releases and carbon emissions in the most cost-effective way. We need to improve policy

management, and we need to integrate decision making across different departments and sectors, as well

as international institutions. We must include sound management of ecosystem services in all planning

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decisions. Whether building a road, or planning an agricultural project or a water scheme, we need to

make absolutely sure that we understand those ecosystem services when we make planning decisions.

And we need to bring stakeholders – particularly marginalized groups – into the planning and

implementation of projects. Of course we need additional protected areas, but first we must turn most

of the existing ‘paper parks’ into real protected areas. We need to exchange knowledge, including that

of local and indigenous groups. We need much more environmentally friendly technology, and

obviously we need to move to a low-carbon economy. We need to influence behaviour through public

education on why and how to reduce the exploitation of threatened ecosystem services, through

establishing reliable certification systems to give people the choice to buy sustainably harvested

products, and by giving all stakeholders access to information about ecosystems and decisions affecting

their services.

Mitigating climate change

If we want to limit climate change to a 2ºC temperature rise, then staying below atmospheric carbon

concentrations of 400 parts per million (ppm) will give us a 50/50 chance. If we let concentrations rise

to 550ppm then we have a 50/50 chance of limiting change to a 3ºC temperature rise. The European

and UK position is to try to stick at 2ºC – a great aspirational goal and I strongly applaud it. However,

the chances of stabilizing at 400 or even 450ppm CO2 equivalent are very remote. So while our policy

should be to aim at stabilizing at 2ºC, we should be ready to adapt to a rise of at least 4ºC, and we should

put the planning in place now.

Stern concluded in his report that if we did nothing to reduce emissions, there would be a 50 per

cent probability of exceeding a 5ºC rise, and I fully agree with him. For Europe, this would probably

mean summer temperatures of 8-10ºC higher than normal, and for northern Canada it would

probably mean summer temperatures of 10-15ºC higher than normal, so really very significant

warming. Stern estimated that this would be at an annual cost of anything from 5 to 20 per cent of

GDP. If we were to achieve the 550ppm trajectory, with a 50 per cent chance of exceeding a 3°C

rise in temperature, the cost would be around 1 per cent of GDP annually. Looking at the 450ppm

trajectory, mitigation costs would be at about 3 per cent of GDP. But even then, we would only have

a 50 per cent chance of keeping the temperature increase at 2ºC, so we need to think about adapting

to something higher.


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There is no such thing as business as usual, but if we project what could happen in the future without

taking time or change into consideration, we can expect something like a 60 per cent increase in

greenhouse gas emissions over the next 50 years. So in order to get onto a pathway for stabilization at 500

to 550ppm, we would need a 60 per cent decrease in emissions by developed countries (relative to 2002

emissions levels) and an increase of only 60 per cent by developing countries instead of the predicted 140

per cent increase under a ‘do nothing’ scenario.

Have we got the technological options to achieve this? Absolutely: more efficient energy production

and use, fuel switching, renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, nuclear fission, improved

management of our forests and agricultural soils. We already have a huge amount of technological

capability to start to move onto the 500 to 550ppm pathway, but there are also certain pre-commercial

activities, like carbon capture and storage, integrated gasification combined cycle, and second and third

generation biofuels, that require investment and research to bring them to market as soon as possible.

It is absolutely crucial that we get a price on carbon, whether it is $20 a tonne, $50 a tonne or $100

a tonne. We need to work across all sectors, and even the modest carbon price of $20 a tonne can start

to stimulate reductions right across these sectors. By the time you get to $100 a tonne, you can get very

significant reductions.

There are many combinations of technologies that could get us onto the 550ppm trajectory, and

it will vary regionally, but the one thing that is critical across the board is carbon capture and storage.

Energy efficiency is a major driver, though there is likely to be a rebound effect. If you give someone

in the developing world a gadget that is twice as efficient as the one they’ve got (or indeed might not

have at all) they will probably use it twice as much. In fact if you gave the average person a car that is

twice as fuel efficient as their current one, they probably wouldn’t use it twice as much but, given the

high petrol prices, they would certainly use it more.

Biofuels (bioethanol from sugar and maize, or biodiesel from palm oil, soy or rape seed) usually play a

significant role in mitigation scenarios. But they are rarely economic. The only place that has made it really

economic was Brazil when oil prices went above $50 a barrel and they could produce sugar for less than

$200 a tonne. But in most other places, especially Europe and North America, biofuels have been heavily

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subsidized. And of course there are some really serious questions regarding the environment. Do biofuels

really reduce greenhouse gas emissions? As a fuel, bioethanol from sugar cane clearly does, but if its

cultivation leads to tropical deforestation it actually causes an increase in emissions. Is there a loss in

biodiversity? Every time you expand into a pristine area you lose biodiversity and risk soil and water

degradation. There are also serious questions about social sustainability: the use of maize for biofuels has

clearly contributed to food price increases, and there has been involuntary displacement of small farmers

by large-scale plantations in certain parts of the world. Here in the United Kingdom, I think we have to

ask ourselves whether we can truly source biofuels at the level we need under the Renewable Transport Fuel

Obligation (RTFO) and the European Directive that are environmentally and socially sustainable.

Summary of the major mitigation challenges

We need a global regulatory framework involving all major emitters including the United States, China

and India. It must be equitable: in other words China and India should not be under the same obligations

as the United States. It must be long term: if we only have an agreement for five years after Kyoto it will

send the wrong signal to the private sector, which needs to know that there will be a long-term market

for low-carbon technology. If we keep the clean development mechanism that we have under the Kyoto

Protocol, we need to expand the range of eligible activities, including avoided deforestation, green

investment schemes, energy efficiency standards, and exploring a sectoral and programmatic approach.

A key priority will be to quantify impacts and assess costs and benefits. We have to realize that on

average there are more costs than benefits, but we should exploit the benefits and minimize the costs.

Investment in adaptation to reduce the negative impacts of climate change will help here, but we have

to accept that whatever we do there will be some residual damage. And we have to accept that the cost

of both adaptation and residual damage will be lower than the cost of inaction. Mitigation costs will

vary depending on whether we are looking at an agricultural system, a water system or coastal zoning

infrastructure, and we need to do a great deal of work to understand the impact sector by sector and

region by region.

On the same basis, we need to establish the physical, behavioural and technological limits to

adaptation – a long-term framework within a long-term goal. These would include, for example, the

physical limits to adaptation on small low-lying islands, the behavioural constraints that influence


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where we live and why, e.g. New Orleans, and the technological limits to the flood defences that can

be constructed, e.g. the Thames Barrier in London.

We need very strict targets for developed countries in order to stimulate the low-carbon economy,

and we need to bring developing countries in gradually. We need robust carbon markets that view

carbon as a commodity just like rice and wheat. We need to further develop technology. We need to

adapt. We need to bring deforestation in. It is not an energy issue alone. We also need to think about

how to bring aviation and shipping – currently not part of the equation – into the system.

Food security

We currently have a major issue with rising food prices: rice has almost doubled in price in the last two

years and maize prices have also gone up significantly. Rapid increase in demand in developing

countries, especially China, has a lot to do with it, but it is not the amount of food that counts, it is

the type of food. A growing demand for meat is putting pressure on grains as livestock feed. We have

had some poor harvests in Australia, Europe and North America, so have less stock than normal. The

increased use of biofuels – especially maize in the United States – is taking up land that was originally

being used for food crops. High energy prices are pushing up agricultural input costs, and some large

exporting countries have become very myopic in the use of export bans. Speculation on the

commodity market has also played its part.

But is this temporary, or are we going to see more of it in the future? Overall, the agricultural sector

has done a superb job. Total food production has exceeded the global rate of demographic change, meaning

that food production per capita has increased. Food prices are at an all-time low despite having doubled

over the last year, which has effectively brought them back to where they were in the mid-1980s. And the

proportion of the world’s population that is undernourished has fallen. Yet we still have 850 million people

going hungry every day. Uneven distribution is the main problem: there is plenty of food in the world but

the supply system isn’t working. In addition, however, increased productivity has done significant damage

to biodiversity, soils and water, and we now have the major contributing factor of climate change.

Agricultural productivity has almost doubled in parts of Asia and the Pacific, and this is what has

brought a lot of people out of poverty and hunger in China. But in sub-Saharan Africa, production has

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actually gone down over the last 20 years, bringing increased hunger and poverty. Even in India, where

the Green Revolution was considered a major success, we still have 50 per cent of children under five

suffering from malnutrition. So while the Green Revolution had significant successes at one level, we

certainly have not solved the problem.

So what are the challenges?

We need to double our production in the next 25 to 50 years. We need to make food more nutritious

and we need to make it more affordable. We need the agricultural sector to feed the world, to enhance

rural livelihoods in developing countries and to stimulate economic growth, but it must not be done with

an exclusively production-oriented focus. It must recognize food safety standards and be both

environmentally and socially sustainable. There are plenty of problems: there is less labour available due

to HIV/AIDS; there are endemic disease problems in Africa (malaria, cholera); rural-to-urban migration

is taking people off the land; there is less water available for irrigation as demand from other sectors grows;

climate change is making the arid and semi-arid areas yet drier; and there is competition for land from

biofuels, roads and expanding cities. This results in major land policy conflicts in many parts of the world

where there are neither individual nor community property rights. We have lost biodiversity due to

mono-cropping, which undermines the genetic base for much of agriculture. There are increasing levels

of acid deposition in many developing countries that have not yet got the industrial standards of Europe

or North America. It is of course self-evident that agriculture has an impact on climate change and

climate change an impact on agriculture. The extensification of agricultural systems leads to unsustainable

forestries which leads to biodiversity loss which also leads to a loss of the genetic base, and we also have

significant loss of fertility, bad irrigation systems, and other poor land-management practices that lead to

the loss of organic matter in the soils, in turn leading to salinization and erosion.

After the Second World War, the only thing that mattered in Europe was production, which seemed

fine at the time. But we now have to look at agriculture as a multi-functional activity, and recognize its

economic, social and environmental dimensions. We have to think through the whole system of

marketing and trade, which is currently neither environmentally nor socially sustainable. Export markets

have created environmental problems, and while many people – including the poor – have gained from

the trade system, the poorest of the poor have not.


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The academic community has helped produce some outstanding knowledge. Scientific assessments

have been the corner stones of work at the national and international level to bring about policy changes

regarding ozone and climate, and they are starting to get people to rethink biodiversity at a local and

national level. International assessments such as the agricultural assessment are starting to turn people’s

minds towards what sort of revolution we need in the agricultural sector to move away from a production

focus to what I would call a sustainability focus. We still have fragmented policies around the world, but

slowly and surely, led by the academic community, policy is beginning to recognize the interconnectivity

of all these issues.

We are moving in the right direction. But we have a long way to go: business as usual – whether it is

in climate change or biodiversity or agriculture – will not work. We need a paradigm shift in all of them.

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Professor Robert T. Watson

Director of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development

Co-Chair of the International Scientific Ozone Assessment

Board Co-Chair of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Former Chair Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Chair of the 1995 Global Biodiversity Assessment

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Environment Edge

on the



Environment on the Edge is a series of lectures given by leading

international figures that examine our current relationship with the

natural world and discuss what tomorrow might bring.

The 2007/08 series lecturers were:

Professor Sharon Turner, Chair of Environmental Law, Queen’s

University, Belfast

Barbara Young, Chief Executive, UK Environment Agency

Lord Adair Turner, former Director-General, CBI; Chair, UK Climate

Change Committee

Professor Sian Griffiths, Professor of Public Health, The Chinese

University of Hong Kong

Professor Nick Owens, Director, British Antarctic Survey

Professor Robert T. Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser, UK

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The lecture series, which continues in 2008/09, is a joint

collaboration between the United Nations Environment

Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-

WCMC), New Hall and St Edmund’s College, University of

Cambridge, and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).



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ISBN: 978-92-807-2993-1

2007/08

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